Baudelaire Symbols

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Recommended: Short note on symbolist movement

Jenny Vincent
Chris Bishop
ENGL 2333
02/22/2014
title for paper
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE ESSENTIALS o Dates: 1821-1867 o Nationality: French; French o Genres: Poetry; Prose-poetry; Art criticism; Essayist; Poetry translator/critic. o Literary Movement: Symbolist
• Symbolist Movement: “A group of late 19th-century French writers, including Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, who favored dreams, visions, and the associative powers of the imagination in their poetry. They rejected their predecessors’ tendency toward naturalism and realism, believing that the purpose of art was not to represent reality but to access greater truths by the “systematic derangement of the senses,” as Rimbaud described it. The translated works of Edgar Allan Poe influenced the French Symbolists” (“Symbolist Movement”).
Personal Background o Family: His father passing away when Baudelaire was young proved to have huge repercussions in his life, as his mother remarried very quickly to a man little like Baudelaire. Baudelaire was more of a free spirit and his stepfather a strict military-man, leading to a long-drawn dissent between the two (Gaskell, 108). o Youth: The contrasting personality of his stepfather spurred on Baudelaire’s youthful rebellion leading to, amongst many things, his contraction of syphilis, which was his eventual cause of death (Norton, 467). o Jeanne Duval: Baudelaire had an on-again off-again relationship with Duval that lasted over 20 years. The relationship of a middle-class Frenchman and an African decent actress was severely looked down upon as socially unacceptable. Baudelaire’s family never gave their blessing for the relationship and that, in addition to their hold on his finances, is most likely why Baudelaire and Duval remaine...

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...nza shows Baudelaire’s materialism, the things that would be there the kind of place it would be. Baudelaire describes a place that its seems he tried to create through frivolously spending on fine furniture and clothes. This perfect place with “flowers of rarest bloom… [and] gold ceilings would there be”(18, 21), has all the fine and beautiful things they want. To Baudelaire this is beautiful to live somewhere with fine expensive things where they can be together for a long time with “furniture that wears the lustre of the years” (15-16). He continues to dream of this place he wishes to bring his love in the last stanza discussing the “drowsy ships” (31) which bring all the wealth of the world to this place, where the sun sets “slowly the land is rolled sleepward under a sea of gentle fire” (39-40) over a town covered in gold and flowers.

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