Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity (review)

Baudelaire’s status as the quintessential poet of urban modernity and as the inaugural figure for aesthetic modernism remains an uncontested fact of our intellectual landscape. The ongoing critical energy of his oeuvre has fundamentally shaped — and continues to shape— our ways of reading cultural production. As an overview of the past fifty years of Baudelaire scholarship will attest, some of the most established theoretical approaches to literature have been articulated through the example of Baudelaire: the structuralist poetics of Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalytic investigations of Mauron and Bersani, the deconstructive readings of de Man, Derrida, and Johnson, historical approaches (Benjamin, Oehler, Burton, Chambers, Terdiman, and others), and most recently, postmodern theories of trauma. Baudelaire scholarship thus charts some of the most salient developments in twentieth-century literary and cultural theory. If Baudelaire is fertile ground for the development of theory, however, theory rarely contains the complex and contradictory force of his poetry. This is hardly surprising given the poet’s vociferous objections to the closure of systems, [End Page 138] described by him as “a sort of damnation that pushes us into perpetual abjurations.” ¹ Perpetual abjurations seem the norm when approaching such a vital and ironic corpus, and Walter Benjamin’s image of the poet as a putschist and conspirator captures some of this recalcitrance to theoretical or historical inscription.