My love affair with Charles Baudelaire
mon cœur mis à nu
Back in my grade school days, I discovered the works of Lemony Snicket. My near life-long love for Daniel Handler (aka Mr. Snicket himself) would necessitate a post of its own; I will not do that love an injustice by attempting to put in summation here. Suffice it to say, A Series of Unfortunate Events (ASOUE) almost single-handedly formed my taste in literature up through today.
As I grew older, I began to find gratification from learning about the artists who influenced the ones that I felt a connection to. That led me back to ASOUE, which I remembered overflowing with references that undoubtedly would enlighten me in some way. What I found, after endless scrolling on various websites, was a multi-page list of references that fellow ASOUE fans had found within the book series. The first one on the list was, of course, the surname of the three main characters themselves; Baudelaire, a direct reference to Charles Baudelaire, a favorite poet of Daniel Handler’s.
Despite being a life-long poet myself, only in the past year did I start to approach poetry with a particularly intentional eye, taking the time to read it first as a human, and then as a writer. I had never truly dissected poetry , or made it a priority to consciously seek out curating my taste in it. Even still, it’s true that the first poet I fell in love with was Edgar Allan Poe, the same year that I discovered ASOUE. Poe spoke to the macabre inclinations that I didn’t know I possessed. I was utterly infatuated with the images he invoked within my young brain, (of ‘kingdoms by the sea’ and hearts in boxes under floorboards), but didn’t think I could find anything that gave me quite the same feelings. But then, Daniel Handler further cemented that love for the dark and mysterious, adding in a narrative voice that was as equally melancholy as it was comforting. Mysterious yet familiar. Pompous but approachable. It was no wonder that I’d end up completely enamored by the poet who took such hold of Handler that he’d be the original bearer of the name which gave the Baudelaire children theirs.
I cannot say which poem of Charles Baudelaire’s I read first. It was probably one of his shorter ones as I’ve never been one for long poems, even in my twenties. Whatever the poem, his style and spirit awoke something in me that only Edgar Allan Poe had before. How funny that Baudelaire had a near life-long spiritual kinship with Poe, having translated many of his works, assisting in Poe’s rise in notoriety in Europe. Baudelaire considered Poe a ‘sacred soul.’
Perhaps this is a core reason why I fell in love with Baudelaire’s command of language. Baudelaire, like Poe, is able to turn the dark and hellish into something resembling beauty. Beautiful because of its wickedness, or beautiful because of its acknowledgment of the disturbing - it’s up to you to decide. But here is an example of just what I’m attempting to convey. Read this, the first two stanzas of his poem ‘A Carcass’ from his most famous collection: Les Fleurs du Mal:
“My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed,Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,
Burning and dripping with poisons,
Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way
Its belly, swollen with gases.”- “A Carcass”, Charles Baudelaire
Translated by William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
Reading further down, one wonders how these stanzas, the last two, can be from the same poem:
“Yes! thus will you be, queen of the Graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you go beneath grass and luxuriant flowers,
To molder among the bones of the dead.Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will
Devour you with kisses,
That I have kept the form and the divine essence
Of my decomposed love!”
Rare is the poet who can combine words like ‘sweet’ in the same stanza as words like ‘carcass’; or ‘kisses’ and ‘decomposed.’
There is no doubt that Baudelaire sees in his subject a beauty as commanding in its radiance as this carcass is in its rottenness. I ask: how do you not fall in love with a mind that could conjure up such vivid imagery and passion? How do you read something like that and then move on?
We have the words of a man tormented by his love, likening it to something utterly repugnant. We see a pained soul, our Baudelaire; one of the pivotal, novel poets arising from Europe who branded into our minds the image of the l’artiste maudit - the tortured artist. The early F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Cobain, and the character of Lemony Snicket in A Series of Unfortunate Events. The specific archetype of Artist that we all, at some point, fall for.
I won't keep you here too much longer; I think I’ve held you long enough. Still, I'll leave you with this, a quote from Charles Baudelaire himself, about Edgar Allan Poe:
“Why should I not admit that what sustained my will was the pleasure of introducing them [the French] to a man [Poe] who resembled me a little, in some respects; that is to say, a part of myself?”
