This major new study of Baudelaire is a journey into the secret language of Les Fleurs du Mal: the expressive pliabilities of its verse-forms and syntax, the fluctuations of its rhythms, its significant sonorities, its metaphorical figures and dynamic image-patterns, its network of nerves and trigger-points, its shifting underground of parallels and contrasts, analogies and antitheses. Through a strategic selection of poems constituting a 'constellation', a formal pattern of mutually illuminating parts, the analysis aims to show that form and theme are indissoluble: that each movement in the texture of the verse, each pulse, each rise and fall, each intensification or release, not only aids and abets the thrust of the poet's inspiration but is moulding and, in the end, creating the subtleties of sense, which cannot exist but in the weft and web of the breathing, evolving text. It is a study which prioritizes the individual poem, then the poem within an expanding formation of poems, then Baudelaire within and beyond that formation: an infini dans le fini. It is also an enquiry into what makes poetry, as well as a provocative contribution to the ongoing debate on the nature of criticism.
A study of Baudelaire's secret language in Les Fleurs du Mal: the expressive pliabilities of its verse-forms and syntax, its significant sonorities, its metaphorical figures and dynamic image-patterns, its network of nerves and trigger-points, its shifting underground of parallels and contrasts, analogies and anitheses.
A prolific poet, art critic, essayist, and translator, Charles Baudelaire is best known for his volumes of verse (Les Fleurs du Mal [Flowers of Evil]) and prose poems (Le Spleen de Paris [Paris Spleen]). This volume explores his prose poems, which depict Paris during the Second Empire and offer compelling and fraught representations of urban expansion, social change, and modernity. Part 1, "Materials," surveys the valuable resources available for teaching Baudelaire, including editions and translations of his oeuvre, historical accounts of his life and writing, scholarly works, and online databases. In Part 2, "Approaches," experienced instructors present strategies for teaching critical debates on Baudelaire's prose poems, addressing topics such as translation theory, literary genre, alterity, poetics, narrative theory, and ethics as well as the shifting social, economic, and political terrain of the nineteenth century in France and beyond. The essays offer interdisciplinary connections and outline traditional and fresh approaches for teaching Baudelaire's prose poems in a wide range of classroom contexts.
Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea explores the concept of rhythm and its central yet problematic role in defining modern French poetry. Forging innovative lines of inquiry linking the detailed analysis of poetic form to the evolution of fundamental aesthetic principles, David Evans offers extensive new readings of the literary and critical writings of the three major poets at the centre of France’s most important poetic revolution. The volume is of interest to all students and readers of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, since here is presented for the first time a thorough comparative study of developments in each writer’s poetic form and theory, focusing on the themes of illusion, deception and the musical metaphor. The book is also intended to stimulate wider critical debate on the interpretation of metrical verse, prose poetry and vers libre, and offers original analytical methods which facilitate the study of poetic form. The author proposes a radical shift in our understanding of the role and mechanisms of poetic rhythm, suggesting that its very resistance to definition and fixity provides a conveniently opaque veil over the difficulties of defining poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Baudelaire's work entered China in the twentieth century amidst political and social upheavals accompanied by a "literary revolution" that called for classical models and modes of expression to be replaced by vernacular language and contemporary content. Chinese writers welcomed their meeting with the West and openly embraced Western literature as providing models in developing their "new" literature. Baudelaire's reception in China provides a representative study of this "meeting of East and west." His work, which has been declared to stand between tradition and modernity, also lies at the intersection between classical and modern literature in China. Many of the best known and most highly regarded writers in twentieth-century China were drawn to Baudelaire's work, and some addressed it directly in their own writings. Bien draws upon H.R. Jauss's theory of the shifting and expanding horizons of expectation in the reading and interpretation of a literary work, and upon James J.Y. Lin's notion of "worlds" received and created by both author and reader, to show how poetic lines, images, and ideas, as well as Chinese critics' comments, eventually weave into a rich picture of Baudelaire's reception in China.
Lost in an art—the art of translation. Thus, in an elegant anagram (translation = lost in an art), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pioneering cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter hints at what led him to pen a deep personal homage to the witty sixteenth-century French poet Clément Marot.”Le ton beau de Marot” literally means ”The sweet tone of Marot”, but to a French ear it suggests ”Le tombeau de Marot”—that is, ”The tomb of Marot”. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter, under the spell of an exquisite French miniature by Marot, got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English—jumping through two tough hoops at once.In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators—even three state-of-the-art translation programs!—to try their hand at this subtle challenge.The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot's little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry—but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Dante's Inferno, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Villon's Ballades, Nabokov's essays, Georges Perec's La Disparition, Vikram Seth's Golden Gate, Horace's odes, and more.Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today's computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.
Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernist poetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire's World provides English-language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts that will lead to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of the great French poet's work.Rosemary Lloyd considers all of Baudelaire's writing, including his criticism, theory, and letters, as well as poetry. In doing so, she sets the poems themselves in a richer context, in a landscape of real places populated with actual people. She shows how Baudelaire's poetry was marked by the influence of the writers and artists who preceded him or were his contemporaries. Lloyd builds an image of Baudelaire's world around major themes of his writing—childhood, women, reading, the city, dreams, art, nature, death. Throughout, she finds that his words and themes echo the historical and physical realities of life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Lloyd also explores the possibilities and limitations of translation. As an integral part of her treatment of the life, poetry, and letters of her subject, she also reflects on published translations of Baudelaire's work and offers some of her own translations.
An engaging and authoritative introduction to an increasingly important and popular literary genre Prose Poetry is the first book of its kind—an engaging and authoritative introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. Poets and scholars Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton introduce prose poetry’s key characteristics, chart its evolution from the nineteenth century to the present, and discuss many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today’s most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. Prose Poetry explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry’ s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women’s essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.
In his poetry and critical writings, Baudelaire performs a vast fusion of experiential and literary sources, explores in a more resolute manner the domain of correspondences, and, thereby, marks a radical departure from the accepted norms. He challenges, humbles, and then reaffirms and recenters Western tradition. That is his finest achievement.
