The Arcades Project - Operi

A decisive line for the comparison with B1anqui: "When earth becomes a trickling
dungeon" ("Spleen W").262 [J48a,4]
The idea of the immobilization of nature appears, perhaps as refuge for the
prescient imagination inunediately before the war, in poems by Georg Heym,
whose images the spleen of Baudelarre could not yet have touched: "But the seas
congeal. On the waves / The ships hang rotting, morose:' Georg Heym, Dicktungen
(Munich, 1922), p. 73 (collection entitled Umbra vitae). [J48a,S]
It would be a big mistake to see in the theoretical positions on art taken by
Baudelaire after 1852-positions which differ so markedly from those of the
period around 1848-the fruits of a development. (There are not many artists
whose work attests so little to a development as that of Baudelarre.) These
positions represent theoretical extremes, of which the dialectical mediation is
given by Baudelaire's whole oeuvre, without being entirely present to his conscious
reflection. The mediation resides in the destructive and purificatory character
of the work. This art is useful insofar as it destroys. Its destructive fury is
directed not least at the fetishistic conception of art. Thus it serves "pure" art, iu
the sense of a purified art. [J49,1]
The first poems of Les Fleurs du mal are all devoted to the figure of the poet. From
them it emerges, precisely insofar as the poet makes appeal to a station and a
task, that society no longer has such things to confer. [J49,2]
An examination of those places where the "1" appears in the poems of Baudelaire
might result in a possible classificatory grouping. In the first five poems of Les
Fleurs du mal, it surfaces but a single time. And further on, it is not unusual to
find poems in which the "1" does not occur. More essential-and, at the same
time, more deliberate-is the way in other poems, like "Reversibilite" or "Har
monie du soir;' it is kept in the background. [J49,3]
-:"La Belle Dorothee"-she must buy back her eleven-year-old sister. 26::\ [J49,4]
1.('1 assure you that the seconds are now strongly accented, and rush out of the clock
crying, 'I am Life, unbearable and implacable Life!m Ch. B., Oeuvres, vol. 1,
p. 411 ("La Chambre double")."·' [J49,S]
From I.'Quelques mots d'introduction" to the " Salon de 1845" : "And at the very
outset, with reference to that impertinent designation, 'the bourgeois,' we beg to
state that we in no way share the prejudices of our great confreres in the world of
art, who for some years now have been striving their utmost to cast anathema upon
that inoffensive being. , .. And, finally, the ranks of the artists themselves contain
so many hourgeois that it is better, on the whole, to suppress a word which does not
define any particular vice of caste," Oeuvres, vol. 2, pp. 15_16,265 The same tendency
in the preface, I.I.Aux Bourgeois," of the " Salon de 184,6." (J49,6]