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Charles Baudelaire, His Life

Chapter 3 No.3

Word Count: 1418    |    Released on: 06/12/2017

ey are numerous to-day-has been rightly judged by Baudelaire as one of the utmost importance. Nothing is m

f inferior merit to that of the great masters. To wish to separate technique from poetry is a modern folly which will lead to nothing but the annihilation of Art itself. We encountered, in an excellent article of Sainte-Beuve on Taine, à pr

me Guizot) does not feel that Boileau is a poet, and, I will go further, he ought not to be sensible of poetry in such a poet. I understand that one does not put all the poetry into the metre; but I cannot at all understand that, when the point in question is Art, one takes no account of Art itself, and depreciates the perfect workers who excel in it. Suppress with a single blow all the poetry in v

the writing of a single Alexandrine, the clever mechanism of prosody, the turn of the stanza and the strophe-whatever its individual formula, its tabulated st

ich seems to us traceable to an article where he recounts his visit to us and relates our conversation. It must not be forgotten that he had just brought us a volume of verses of two absent friends, that he was commissioned to make known, and we remarked these

t there are to be found a large number of libertine sonnets, which not only have the qu

f no digression, no caprice? The irregular in what should be regular, lack of form in what should be symmetrical-what can be more illogical and annoying? Each infraction of a rule disturbs us like a doubtful or a false note. The sonnet is a s

rs in his poetry several happy examples. He applied this form, which has the vague, rocking sound of a magical incantation half heard in a dream, to the subjects of melancholy memory a

in the interior of the verse a harmonious effect. Sainte-Beuve, to whom none of these delicate touches is unknown, and who continually

is often to be found in the prose of Beaumarchais, and the Scandinavian poets make great use of it. These trifles will undoubtedly appear frivolous to utilitarians, progressive and practical men who think, with Stendhal, that

have in themselves, and apart from the meanings they express, intrinsic beauty and value, like precious stones still uncut and not set in bracelets, in necklaces or in rings. They charm the connoisseur who watc

e tranquillity and gentle undulation of the swelling surge, sometimes dash themselves to pieces in the foam a

actions. They also display strange caprices; the author encases in his metre, as in a frame of ebony, the nightly sights of a cemetery where the eyes of the owls

d of luxury for the coffin, who dreams in his solitude, starting at each drop of icy rain that filters through his coffin-lid. He shows us, in his curiously disordered bouquet of faded flowers, old letters, ri

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