Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles
Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about
Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as
well. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire
as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught
in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity
capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. The Baudelaire
who steps forth from these pages is the flaneur who affixes images
as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects
urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing
to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He
is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his
literary production: "Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet:
as a flaneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought,
but in reality to find a buyer." Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a
social poet of the very first rank.
The introduction to this volume presents each of Benjamin's
essays on Baudelaire in chronological order. The introduction,
intended for an undergraduate audience, aims to articulate and
analyze the major motifs and problems in these essays, and to
reveal the relationship between the essays and Benjamin's other
central statements on literature, its criticism, and its relation
to the society that produces it.
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