Commentary on “Correspondances” by Baudelaire

As I prepare to introduce you more fully to my new CD audiobook, The Spleen of Melbourne: Prose Poetry & Fiction, it occurred to me that it would be worth exploring my emotional, intellectual, and artistic relationship with the poet whose influence upon that work is as significant as any of the other broad strands of influence I’ve traced in my notes while developing the presentation for the formal product launch.

And today on The Melbourne Flâneur, I post for your delectation, dear readers, a video I recently shot on location in Geelong, strolling beneath the ‘living pillars’ of the City Hall as I recite my translation of Charles Baudelaire’s poem, “Correspondances”.

You will read a lot of commentary about this sonnet online, for “Correspondances”—(poem no. 4 in Les Fleurs du mal)—is M. Baudelaire’s æsthetic testament, the work in which he articulates his artistic cri de cœur. In it, he states his theory of ‘correspondences’, the synæsthetic intuition that ‘[l]es parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent’, or, as I translate it in the video above, ‘[s]ounds, scents and colours to one another correspond.’

Brief as it is, being a sonnet of just fourteen lines and 140 syllables, “Correspondances” is a notoriously difficult poem to translate into English, and being M. Baudelaire’s most important philosophical statement, it is the supreme test of anyone who aspires to translate the thoughts of this poet into la langue anglaise.

The second verse of “Correspondances”, written in rhyming couplets, appears as a teaser and a taster on the back of my book of Baudelaire translations, Flowers Red and Black (2013), and I confess that for years I could not get beyond that second verse.

The problem is that the poem, incontournable as it is in the œuvre of M. Baudelaire, is rather ‘disjointed’. The philosophic statement of the theory of correspondences—which is all the more profound for being all the more profoundly condensed—occurs in the two quatrains which form the first half of the sonnet. Then a sort of ‘cæsura in ideas’ occurs, a disjunction after which the two tercets of the second half explain the practical implications of the theory through specific examples, albeit rather oblique ones.

But, to my mind, there is also a ‘cæsura in ideas’ between the first quatrain and the second. It is the second in which the theory of correspondences is formally articulated, and between it and the first, the line of logic, the general premises M. Baudelaire advances as the set of assumptions which lead to the conclusion of the stated theory, is as oblique as between the first half of the poem and the second.

I have never read a really good translation of this poem in English, and to my mind, it is one of a small corpus of M. Baudelaire’s poems, including “Le Cygne” and “Le Voyage”, which, at some fundamental level, are basically untranslatable. The thought he expresses in “Correspondances” is a subtle intuition of, simultaneously, such profound extension and such profound condensation that it can only really be apprehended and comprehended in the French formulation he gives it.

And I make no claims of having solved the immense problems which “Correspondances” throws up for the English translator in selecting a unitary interpretation of those inscrutable lines which, in French, express multiple ideas simultaneously, except to say that of all the possible interpretations that I’ve read in English, mine appears (to me at least) to best convey ‘the spirit of the logic’ which is implicit in the language M. Baudelaire employs, and which is particularly extensive and particularly condensed in the two quatrains.

The second quatrain came rather easily to me, which is not to say that the subtle theory it articulates is not difficult to make comprehensible in English. But it is really the first verse that is a devil of a thing to translate into our bastard tongue, with its rather Teutonic utility and sense of the material rather than the metaphysic. It was purely on account of the first quatrain that, for eight years, I despaired of ever writing a full translation of those fourteen brief lines which are the supreme test of the Baudelairean interpreter.

It became like a ‘thought problem’ to me: at odd times over those eight years, I would pull out the first quatrain of “Correspondances” and take another look at it, trying to find a fresh key that would unlock the puzzle. I knew what M. Baudelaire was saying in French, even down to the intuitive subtleties which are implied, the ‘spirit of the philosophy’ which no other translator I’ve read seems to be really ‘get’, and which you can only understand if you are also an artist, like M. Baudelaire, who has crucified his whole life on the hellish nails that are words, living only for them. But I could not figure out a way of accurately representing those extensive densities in an equally concise English.

At its centre, the whole puzzle comes down to solving one word in line 3 of the poem—y. Appropriately algebraic, that single-letter word, sometimes a pronoun, sometimes an adverb in French, has no correspondence in English, and as a single syllable is capable of condensing several syllables of information in an elegant equivalence which communicates volumes.

To the unwary translator of “Correspondances”, y presents multiple traps. But if you solve for y, you’re out of the woods—if you’ll pardon the pun. Those who watch the video will get the joke.

The linked tercets of verses 3 and 4 are much less challenging to translate, except that the poem falls away rather dramatically from the philosophic heights M. Baudelaire attains at the end of verse 2.

This is not necessarily a criticism, or a suggestion that the poem, despite its importance in his œuvre, is somehow ‘underdone’. The sense of disjointedness I noted above seems to me to be both a deliberate ploy and an inevitable consequence of the intense compression attendant upon the sonnet form when faced with such a large idea.

Nevertheless, the challenge of verses 3 and 4 lies principally in the fact that, from the dense heights of abstraction M. Baudelaire attains in verses 1 and 2, the ‘cæsura in ideas’ involves a much more prosaic, worldly turn in the language. A straight English rendition of the trebly-linked examples in verses 3 and 4 tends to read rather underwhelmingly, and the challenge lies principally in conveying the synæsthetic potency of the trinitarian sensual correspondence of sound, scent and colour in a sufficiently forceful English without departing too far from the original letter of the French text.

I’m known for the ‘accuracy’ of my translations of Baudelaire. I avoid the distorting inventions of translators like the late Dr. William Crosby, who seek a rhyming equivalence in English. Only Edna St. Vincent Millay, a sufficiently desperate soul to share M. Baudelaire’s experience of life and his vision of it, was able to find rhymes in English which paralleled the spirit of his text without distorting the letter of it too greatly.

But being a prosateur rather than a poète pur-sang, I take a more analytic, critical approach to translation. I want a correspondence in images and ideas—the spirit of the letter, if you will—rather than a text in English, written with strict respect to the rules of English prosody, which parallels the French text but substitutes English forms for the equally strict—nay, stricter—rules of French prosody.

That is not a happy solution, and seems to me an untenable approach for a modern translator to take, in the main. Though separated only by a slender sleeve of water, the music of the French language is very different to the music of the English tongue: the rhythm and syllabic emphasis of words hit the ear differently, so finding equivalent rhyming schemes in English seems to me to be a laborious and impractical affair which introduces unnecessary distortions into the text.

Thus, when translating M. Baudelaire from French to English, rhyme must, regrettably, be the first casualty of war because only very rarely (as in verse 2 of my translation of “Correspondances”) will you chance upon the happy accident of a corresponding couplet in English that communicates the same idea M. Baudelaire is expressing in French.

He would disapprove of this, regarding rhythm and rhyme as being the essence of beauty in poetry, but, as T. S. Eliot observed, modern poetry begins with M. Baudelaire, and all the execrable excesses of our juvenile ‘free verse’ (a contradiction in terms that only we moronic moderns, the heretics of all inherited rules, could entertain with a straight face) can be laid at the feet of the poet who never availed himself of such an obscene form.

Thus a modern translation of the father of modern poets must take account of the æsthetic crimes he inadvertently unleashed upon the world when he opened the Pandora’s Box of modernity in verse. Crime and the nature of modern evil is the spirit and subject of Les Fleurs du mal. As I noted in a previous post, M. Baudelaire is the fountainhead of decadence and degeneracy in modern art, and though I might flatter myself on this score, I think that my free verse translations of him, which focus on conveying the spirit of the letter of the French text—the ‘ideational image’ of his poems—still manage to convey the loftiness, the freezing haughtiness, the alternating erudition and vulgarity of his voice, which trips out in strict alexandrines with the precise, Morse-like rap of a nail tapped on tin.

When I speak about ‘the idea’ of “Correspondances”, I am speaking about something that might equally be called ‘the image’ of it—the total image that the poem forms in the mind of the reader. The nature and quality of thought in poetry is very different to the analytic intellection which takes place in prose: ideation in poetry is imagistic.

When I translate a poem by M. Baudelaire, in place of the rhyme of the original, I am seeking instead to convey to the reader the most lucid distillation of that ideational image into English, the prosodic quality of M. Baudelaire’s thought by some of the other musical devices he typically avails himself of, such as alliteration, assonance and rhythm, and the jarring juxtaposition of a tony tone with slangy argot.

The ideational image of the poem is cumulatively formed by the actual words on the page. Thus, I seek the closest English words in sound and meaning, words that evoke that deeper image, the implicit, lucid one which shines through the French text, while equally seeking to balance the colloquial quirks that occur in both languages.

That approach usually serves me well, but with the first verse of “Correspondances”, I eventually realized that I would have to avail myself of a tool I rarely use. ‘Images that shine through’ the material manifestation of words, as of Nature itself, is the theme of that first verse of “Correspondances”—images almost untranslatable, in fact, except to the poet (‘l’homme’ of line 3) who walks, as a priest, through the ‘forêts de symboles’, trees upon whose trunks (the ‘vivants piliers’ of line 1) are engraved the ‘Bible’ of Nature, and which form a kind of Salomonic Temple which knows its priest—the poet-prophet—when it sees him, and trusts him to translate and voice the unvocable language of its celestial design.

Even in prose, as you can see by that summary, it’s almost impossible to comprehensibly express the cascade of logical premises which form the profound intuition at the heart of the ideational image in the first quatrain of “Correspondances”. To anyone who is not an artist in words, a priest in this deepest sense, one who has devoted his life to giving praise to God through the beauty of words, the image of that verse must read like a schizophrenic delusion, that cascade of logical premises as a psychotic break with material reality.

But that’s the tool I use with M. Baudelaire when strict attention to the actual words on the page fails me: Intuitively knowing in my soul what he means and feeling in my soul, and the experience of my life, the deep logic of it also, I place myself in his place and let our two sensibilities—separated by languages; separated by cultures, continents and hemispheres; separated by centuries—mingle and synthesize, and I allow him, in an act of ‘channelling’, to speak through me, through the particular thought, the particular language, the particular experience of this fraternal ‘autre moi’ separated from him by all that is foreign to his language, thought and experience, and to voice in his place—and in English—some personal amplification on what is implicit in the French lines.

Nowhere, for instance, in “Correspondances” does M. Baudelaire use the words ‘poet’ or ‘priest’ to designate the reader of Nature he refers to merely as ‘l’homme’ in line 3 of the poem. But I knew that ‘the man’ of the first verse of “Correspondances” is this figure I call ‘the poet-prophet’, the priest who reads the mystic signs of Nature, and who commits himself—at immense material sacrifice—to the holy penury of Art, the daily, unremunerative crucifixion of attempting to nail down the untranslatable beauty of God’s Creation in the fallen words of Man.

In the final verse of poem no. 2, “L’Albatros”, M. Baudelaire, referring obliquely to himself, names ‘Le Poëte’ as the ‘prince of air’ who reigns and ranges above the icy wastes of life like the mighty albatross, and yet, hobbled by the immensity of his mental wings, is condemned to suffer its base indignities on the ground, ‘in the midst of boos and jeers’. And in poem no. 3, “Élévation”, he writes of his mind as soaring, ‘like flocks of larks’, above this grounded, earthly prison to Heaven, seeking a union with all Creation, as ‘He who floats above life and understands without thought / The language of flowers, and of other mute things!’

Thus, ‘The Poet’ of “L’Albatros” and the ‘He’ of “Élévation” are consubstantial with ‘the man’ of “Correspondances”: the soaring poet of the first is the communing prophet of the second, and this reader-writer of the mute language of Nature is what I call the ‘poet-prophet’ of the third poem, the (re)unified man—Mr. Blake’s Albion—who is the priest of Nature, the translator of God’s Creation, the flâneur who traverses the Temple reading the mystic signs graven on the pillars, and who is recognized by the living Temple itself as its interpreter and intercessor with other men.

Le poète-prophète

Just as, in M. Baudelaire’s life, he was condemned to be known not as a poet in his right, but primarily as the translator of his spiritual frère, Edgar Allan Poe, into French, so it seems that in my life, I am known not for my own words, but as the translator of my spiritual brother, M. Baudelaire, into English, his interpreter and intercessor with the generations who are only now, in the last two terrible years, waking up to the full, sanguinary horror of capitalistic modernity he prophesied 150 years ago, an epic crime against humanity we are all complicit in.

I am the ‘post-runner’ rather than the forerunner of M. Baudelaire, his St. Paul rather than his St. John, the apostle and not the evangelist of his church of satanic Catholicism. As poet, dandy and flâneur, he predicted this hell of technological progress, this inferno of late-capitalistic modernity in exponential, existential decline, and which I, as writer, dandy and flâneur, ring in your ears with all the din of bitter prophecy in the prose poems of The Spleen of Melbourne.

And if I find, in my flâneurial trébuchements among les épaves of Melburnian postmodernity, some intimations of the Baudelairean ‘Ideal’ in the City to balance my Baudelairean ‘Spleen’ about it, some transcendent Beauty in the unutterable Horror of our postmodern, urban lives, it is because, like M. Baudelaire, I am prophet enough to see what comes next, the networkcentric spirit of life that may just succeed the sanguinary, Stygian darkness, the hellish abyss we are now joyously hurtling, as lemmings, headlong into.

The prophetic powers of the poet are not necessarily about seeing into the future. Rather, as I intimated above with respect to the nature and quality of thought in poetry, the prophetic powers of the poet lie in seeing into the present, into the consequential logic of the world-historical totality which surrounds him, the roots of distant premises which reach their intermediate conclusions in his burgeoning, and the burgeoning of the world of nature that is coexistent with his existence, and the far-off conclusions which will bud their fleurs du mal from this present.

The poet-prophet intuitively sees, in other words, the mandala of the world-historical totality’s ideational image in its eternal present, which is as much to say that he apprehends a vision of God. This is the condition of clairvoyance alluded to by M. Baudelaire’s spiritual heir, Arthur Rimbaud, in two famous letters, one of which I reproduce here.

… I want to be a poet, and I work to make myself a seer…. It involves attaining the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. The travails are enormous, but one must be strong to be born a poet, and I recognize myself as a poet. It isn’t my fault at all. It’s wrong to say: I think. One ought rather to say: I am thought. …

I am another. Too bad for the wood that discovers itself to be a violin.

—Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Georges Izambard, 13 May, 1871 (my translation)

What distinguishes the quality of thought displayed by the poet-prophet from the form of prosy ratiocination displayed by the scientist or savant is precisely this quality of ‘being’ thought, of being thought through by Nature. The ‘seer’ is the eye of panoptic Nature, that ‘forêt de symboles / Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers’, a mere viewing device It sees through, like a camera, and M. Baudelaire makes a similar observation to M. Rimbaud in his prose poem “Le Confiteor de l’Artiste”, when he says:

What greater delight than to drown one’s gaze in the immensity of sky and sea!  Solitude.  Silence.  The peerless chastity of the azure!—A little sail shivering on the horizon which, in its puniness and isolation, imitates the inexorable march of my existence; the monotonous melody of the swell;—all these things think through me,—or I think through them (for in the vastness of reverie, the ego soon loses itself).  They think, I say, but musically, or pictorially—without quibbles; without syllogisms; without deductions.

—Charles Baudelaire, “Le Confiteor de l’Artiste” (my translation)

There are no quibbles, syllogisms or deductions in poetic thought: however the roots of premises and the buds of conclusions extend over time, from man’s perspective, the Kabbalistic tree or burning bush is grown, is bloomed, is fully present and flaming in the eternal present, and the idea of this totality is apprehendable as poetic image.

To be a poet is to be a prophet, a visionary, and while M. Baudelaire predicts the hell of technological progress we are now inescapably in, our present subjugation to algorithms, as the great prophet of modernity, he is the visionary of our present troubles. The predictive quality of the prophet is a clairvoyance of present trends: the logical consequences of present premises are intuited in an image, and the act of ‘soothsaying’ is a mere articulation of the latent, the world-historical inevitability that is invisible to the smug bourgeois.

In my recent post announcing the release of The Spleen of Melbourne, I reproduced M. Baudelaire’s scathing critique of progress, a premonitory articulation of the consequential logic of capitalistic modernity which would have been obvious to the most fuggish thinker of his day, but the consideration of which the smug bourgeois was happy to defer for the bonheur of exponentially increasing material comfort.

But where, pray tell, is the guarantee of progress for the morrow? For the disciples of the sages of steam and chemical matches understand it thus: progress only manifests itself to them under the guise of an indefinite series. Where, then, is the guarantee? It only exists, I say, in your credulity and fatuity.

I leave to one side the scientific question of whether, in rendering humanity more delicate in direct proportion to the new pleasures it delivers them, indefinite progress might not be humanity’s most ingenious and cruellest of tortures; if, proceeding through an obstinate negation of itself, it might not be a form of suicide unceasingly renewed, and if, enclosed in the fiery circle of divine logic, it might not resemble the scorpion that stings itself with its terrible tail, this eternal desire which ultimately makes for eternal despair?

—Charles Baudelaire, “Exposition universelle, 1855” (my translation)

In the ideational image of the scorpion eternally stinging itself, we see the prediction of our present predicament, where we are driven ever onward to a more debased and aborted version of life by the needle of a technology that is on its own exponent of self-actualization, independent of man, but which requires, for the moment, a species of delusive slaves who believe that they control it to help it actualize itself.

That latent consequence, invisible to the smug partisans of progress who marvelled at the Paris Expo of 1855, was never a science fiction to be divined in a crystal ball. It was a fact of science, the line of which the holistic thinker, steeped in the world-historical actuality of his time, could trace in very few logical shinnyings down the decision tree of consequential logic.

In the last year on The Melbourne Flâneur vlog, I’ve variously voiced my misgivings to you about calling myself a ‘poet’, a laurel often tossed on my brow by others, but one which sits uncomfortably for me. The prose/poetry dichotomy is one I propose to address in my presentation at the formal product launch for The Spleen of Melbourne, offering a working definition of my prosy variety of prosody. But if I am a poet in any sense, it is in this quality of ever-present prophecy, in this dedication to seeing and voicing the unutterable, the untranslatable vision of modern Beauty and Horror which I share with M. Baudelaire.

Art is a priesthood into which no man should enter lightly, and an angel with a flaming sword should beat back most applicants at the gate. Eden is behind it, but it is an Eden of barely supportable Purgatory, Eden as Camino, as Way, as Path, as Dao. Once you’ve taken Holy Orders and are in the Path of Art, forsaking wife and child and every bourgeois compromise of delusive comfort in a gran rifiuto, the Way is cut off behind you by that same angel with a flaming sword.

You must walk onward to the Vision, traversing the selva oscura and saying what you see, nailing it down as perfectly as possible on the imperfect cross of human language.

This is the unremunerative path that M. Baudelaire chose for himself, though to say ‘choose’ is to make a falsehood of the Faustian pact. If you ‘choose’ Art, it is almost certain that you are not an artist. There is no material sacrifice in choice. Rather than choosing, one sacrifices, one gives up what is actually necessary and needful to survive. The artist prefers to die than live an inauthentic life.

In a choice between two suicides, the spiritual suicide of living a compromised, inauthentic life is more shameful and dishonourable than the physical wasting away of penury and starvation.

That was M. Baudelaire’s uncompromising view, and the incomprehensibility of such an extreme position to most of his translators is why, I find, they fail to understand him and make a grotesque exaggeration of his words.

They treat him like an eccentric figure from history, one who has been recuperated by the bourgeois spectacle of academe, and their pharisaical translations read as blandly as whited sepulchres erected to this Jeremiah made safe by time. But he is not an historical eccentric to me, and from his furious kicking against the pricks of ‘quantity’ and ‘utility’, the twin virtues of capitalistic progress, I draw a salutary example for my own life.

Compelled by the Vision of Beauty and possessed by it, M. Baudelaire, with his ‘ailes de géant’, had to hobble through the hell of an uncomprehending crowd, through its boos and jeers, its gifles and crachats, through the jostling of bailiffs and the haranguing of bratty mistresses, weathering the sneering indulgence of journalists and editors with eyes unevolved to share his vision, and who rated the work of his days a very cheap thing, hardly worth a sou.

The desperation to live

M. Baudelaire was possessed by a kind of ‘desperation to live’ which his impecunious lifestyle de dandy seems, to the bourgeois mind, to have been distinctly at odds with. With his talent for words (thus le bon bourgeois reasons), surely he could have made some mammon for his manna by turning out something more commercial than spleen-filled screeds, translations of the Yankee lunatic Poe, and critical manifesti which belabour the pates of right-thinking people?

But the ‘desperation to live’ of which I speak has nothing to do with the gross, vulgar, bourgeois suicide of ‘making a living’. More than the bourgeois abortions who keep the greased wheels of Capital a-turning by grace of their internalized protestant slavery, the artist is possessed by the very spirit of life. As a priest praising Creation through his very being, he must push forth his shoots, he must bud and bloom with the same desperate urge to be as the lilies of the field and the fowls of the air. If he ‘makes’ anything of his life, the products of his living are the artefacts and the testaments of his being—and having been—in the world.

In French, they call our English ‘lust for life’ (the title, of course, of a book and film on that poet-prophet in paint, the sainted Vincent) ‘rage de vivre’—a rage to live. M. Baudelaire, bien sûr, was possessed of plenty of rage:—it is a necessary alchemical constituent of the condition of spleen, that urban alienation which is attendant upon technological capitalism.

This desperation to really live, and this despair at what the bourgeois ‘market’ of technologically-driven capital offers us as ‘life’, is something I can passionately relate to. Indeed, it was the despair and the desperation to live that drove me to Paris, the capital of flânerie, and my fated encounter with M. Baudelaire.

In that seductive paradise of artifice which he had both loved and loathed, which had been his muse as it was mine, I carried him in my pocket, a handsome little edition of Richard Howard’s translations (still the best, à mon avis) which I had picked up from the Abbey Bookshop in the Quartier Latin, and a cheap little Folio edition, the kind that French high school students use for le Bac, scored from the Virgin Megastore on the Champs pour un peu d’euros.

How often I dipped into him in those dearly bought hours of ‘Life’ under the trees of the Tuileries, or in the golden bosom of Le Cépage! I had no plans of being M. Baudelaire’s amanuensis in those hours, no intimation that when I returned to the exile of this country, my hours of Life ‘spent’, I would commence, in my antipodean ‘after-Life’, a career as his interpreter and translator.

At first, writing translations of M. Baudelaire’s poems was merely a way to practise my French, but at once I felt the desperation and despair of his spirit, kindred to my own.

It’s this desperation to live and despair at what we are offered as life that other translators don’t seem to ‘grok’ about M. Baudelaire. Like his fraternal twin and the object upon whom he exercised his own powers of translations, Mr. Poe, M. Baudelaire is an easy poet to parody and burlesque.

That quality in his own writing which Mr. Poe called the ‘arabesque’, a kind of baroque grotesquerie, an exquisite, attenuated and diffuse sensation of all-pervading horror, as if it were worked and woven into the very design of the Creation, like the Islamic Allah Who is present everywhere and visible nowhere in the vaulted cave of the mosque, a quality which critics now file under the cliché head of ‘Gothic horror’, is also present in M. Baudelaire’s poetry.

To have the exquisitely tortured senses of a Roderick Usher and to feel all life to be ennuyeuse is beyond the ken of most English translators who presume to approach M. Baudelaire. The clerisy of capitalistic academe has made them too comfortable, too safe and pudgy to know the many meanings, the shades of sense, in the condition of ennui beyond boredom.

In our language and Anglophonic culture, the very name ‘Baudelaire’ has become a joke-word, a synonym for a kind of bilious, juvenile poetry, the hero of pretentious, self-regarding teenagers who churn out worthless, unrhyming doggerel. Look, for instance, at the desecration done to his reputation by Lemony Snicket.

But there is nothing juvenile in M. Baudelaire’s style, nor in his treatment of his habitual themes. The desperation to really live and the despair he feels at the commercial simulacrum of life is an oscillation between Spleen and the Ideal, an exquisite sensitivity to these two poles of the modern condition. It is at once an intense, almost suicidal desire to be ‘anywhere out of the world’ whilst simultaneously desiring, with all one’s being, to enter into the demiurgic paradise of eternally temporal, ephemerally everlasting existence—the Kingdom of Heaven which Christ promises us, and which no one has ever found.

The worthless, unrhyming doggerel of self-regarding teenagers (such as the Beats, for instance) is all pretentious spleen and no ideal. As a prosateur, as one whose mind is more naturally attuned to the critical and the analytic rather than the holistic, totalizing thinking of poetry, I often lament that we have no poets in this time.

How can we in a world undergoing an exponential, existential collapse, a world with no myths or gods to sing the eternal verity of?

A world without poetry

There cannot really be a poetry that is not deeply connected to Nature, that does not have its roots embedded in the life-supporting reality of Nature. The poet, as the first verse of “Correspondances” tells us, is the reader-writer who interprets and translates the eternal truth of Nature’s mythos. He is the one, in Mr. Milton’s words, who ‘justif[ies] the Ways of God to Men.’

To be a poet-prophet in these days of steam and science, this mystifying mummery of scientism, of unreflecting faith in a treacherous mythos cobbled together by a cabal of reptilian technocrats who parody and burlesque, with their perversion of the hypothetico-deductive scientific method, the means of critical thought is to be a most reactionary form of revolutionary, a voyant who is the most critical croyant.

For the poet-prophet in his priest-like calling, his abiding, unshakeable faith in the mystic and the magickal, is most violently at odds with the godless, nihilistic ‘spirituality’ of this scientific New Age. Truly, the poet in modern times, like M. Baudelaire, is the most intransigent enemy of doctrine and orthodoxy.

We have no poetry in this hell, and no poetry can live and grow in these insupportable, infernal climes of concrete, glass, steel, iron and plastic—plastic, parbleu!—except, perhaps, the passionate reactions of rejection, the Non serviams of souls like M. Baudelaire and myself who lust after the very worlds of abstract artificiality they execrate with venom, the paradisal, slatternly cities, the Babylonia they adore and abhor.

There is nothing juvenile in saying, ‘I love you, you Beautiful Bitch, but I will not serve you.’

M. Baudelaire and I are perhaps the first souls to breathe a totally artificial air that burns our souls at every avid breath, to have the cybernetic lungs capable of supporting ‘le feu clair’ of an algorithmic air. Despite ourselves, we have made a ‘New Nature’ of artificiality: we are the first colonists of the City, pioneers who have made our settlement in the inhospitable, unsupportable Kamchatka of pure artifice, like two men living on the moon. Somehow we thrive in the airless hell of the City, for we have lungs and etheric beings evolved to the New Nature of Absolute Artificiality.

In psycho-neurotics like M. Baudelaire and myself, a kind of ‘satanic Catholicism’ reaches its hysterical pitch: We recognize this Creation, which the poet is sacredly charged with lauding, as the work of the Urizenic Demiurge, and we must praise this paradisal hell we hate, bless it with curses, pile bileful hosannas in the highest upon it.

‘Love your enemy,’ Christ says. Verily, the poet-prophet in the modern era is an æsthetic terrorist to the totalitarian, bourgeois order of doctrinal ‘right thinking’ and orthodox ‘common sense’, one who detonates his life—which is an échec, an abortion, a failure by the mad economic standards of technological capitalism—in a vision of Truth and Beauty, a vision of how men and women could live as ghosts in the Lawrentian Machine of the City, an armée des ombres, résistants to the internalized esclavage, the dark, satanic mills and the mind-forged manacles of despotic progress.

The flâneur’s enemy, this empire of whorehouses and outhouses built on Seine, or Yarra, or Thames, or Tiber, or Euphrates, is the very thing this poet-prophet loves the most.

Ethics and æsthetics

We have had less and less poetry in the last hundred years until now we have none at all precisely because the Pandora’s Box of crimes in verse that M. Baudelaire inadvertently opened up has led to the denigration, the desecration, the degeneracy and decadence of the rules of prosody.

A laissez-faire ‘free verse’ where there are no rules and anything goes is no verse at all: it has no incantatory quality, that rhythm so dear to M. Baudelaire, and which is the beat of song and the heartbeat of prayer.

In its place, we have what I call ‘prose broken into lines’—bad prose—prosaic prose at that—the doggerel of narcissistic teenagers. This is prose that believes ‘vagueness’ of expression to be somehow ‘poetic’, when in fact poetry is the most precise language of all—more precise than the prosy language of science, even, for, as Mr. Coleridge noted, prose equals words in the best order, while poetry equals the best words in the best order.

The truth which we moronic moderns, we arrogant heretics of all inherited wisdom, are loath to admit is that æsthetics and ethics are one: man’s innate sense of ‘the good’, ‘the true’, and ‘the beautiful’ are a trinity of equivalencies, correspondences which have their union in God.

La bonne forme, le beau style: the sprezzatura of elegant expression, though a deeply contrived ‘effortlessness’, as per Sg. Castiglione, ultimately conforms to the naturalness which is godly creation, the good, the true, and the beautiful being ultimately the sole province of the Creator.

The ‘artifice’ of human Art thus aspires to godly Nature by following the Lawmaker’s rules. And, as Hr. Kant implies when he defines artistic genius as ‘the innate mental disposition … through which nature gives the rule to art’, these celestial æsthetic laws can only be inferred by close study of His Creation, since it ‘must be abstracted from what the artist has done’.

The rules of beautiful prosodic composition are thus derived from moral laws. As Anne Jamison pithily puts it in her journal article “Any Where Out of this Verse: Baudelaire’s Prose Poetics and the Aesthetics of Transgression” (2001), ‘Syntax is morality.’

Hence, M. Baudelaire, anticipating Hr. Nietzsche, goes ‘beyond good and evil’ in Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris to create a new moral order of eternal beauty out of the hellish temporal chaos of the City.

These are the ‘æsthetics of transgression’ which Ms. Jamison ascribes to him, for M. Baudelaire—well before Hr. Nietzsche—creates for himself a ‘transvaluation of all values’ where Beauty is the paramount, superordinate Ideal, and, ‘being with God and next to God’, is embedded all through His demiurgic Creation—even in the temporal hell of urban Spleen.

In her article, Ms. Jamison compares two similar and yet very different poems from the “Spleen et Idéal” section of Les Fleurs du mal:—poem no. 17, “La Beauté”, my translation of which you can listen to on Bandcamp, and poem no. 21, “Hymne à la Beauté”.

‘The “Hymne” Beauty,’ she says, ‘transcends good and evil not because she is above them, removed from the fray, as the first goddess [of “La Beauté”] suggests of herself, but because she breaks the rules with impunity—she has all the power and answers to no authority.’

This Beauty makes evil good, and in some sense, this is the Nietzschean conception of going ‘beyond’ good and evil into some super-moral realm where these earthly ethical distinctions are transcended, but also radically reëvaluated, resolved, and reintegrated in a new union. In the godly cosmic totality, all the evil under the sun is good, it is a part—parts, even—of Creation, party to it. And as the analytic-critical prosateur rather than the holistic, totalizing poet deals specifically in ‘the parts’ of the Creation, he deals necessarily in the ambiguity of things which appear, at the material level, to be evil—even seductively beautiful in their apparent evil—fleurs du mal, as it were.

This is where I find myself (if I can call myself a poet at all) in the prose poems of The Spleen of Melbourne, taking my inspiration and my model from M. Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris and Hr. Benjamin’s Arcades Project.

Between the poet in prose and the poet pur-sang, the hedgehog and the fox dichotomy rears its useful analogic head: Poetry, as I said above, expresses ‘the Idea’ (which is to say, God, the totality of Creation, its Brahmanic Oversoul) as an Image, a cosmological mandala, while prose expresses ‘ideas’, the discreet ‘bricks in the wall’ of His Creation.

There is an element through which the short story attains a superiority even over the poem. Rhythm is necessary to the development of the conception of beauty, and beauty is the grandest and most noble end of the poem. Now, the artifices of rhythm present an insurmountable obstacle to the minute development of thoughts and expressions which have truth as their object.

—Charles Baudelaire, “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe” (my translation)

This is the reef against which the prosaic, analytic sentiment founders. The poet pur-sang, having a holistic, totalizing vision and worldview, sees the harmonious repetition of beautiful order—its rhythm—all throughout the cosmos—that Allah Who is present everywhere and visible nowhere.

The prosateur, by contrast, sees the discordant disjunctions, juxtapositions, enjambments and adjacencies between things—the grout between the bricks. These lines of logical thought sing out to him. They may ‘flow’ in their linear branchings, bifurcations and ramifications, as a set of premises to the inevitable estuary of their conclusion, but not with the harmony of rhythm. Each premise must be ‘developed’, like a musical theme, or leitmotiv. It must be planed, and turned, and set as a sovereign jewel into the logical architecture of the wall only once the prosateur is certain that it can bear the load of the next course of ideas to be placed upon it.

The model of the prose poem suggests the possibility of reading Baudelaire’s entire œuvre as an integrated performance of his transgressive concept of beauty. … Baudelaire’s very inconsistencies and contradictions effectively stage a performance of the transgressive aesthetic he valorizes in the 1855 “Exposition” essay. He enacts this drama in three genres [poetry, prose poetry, and art criticism] and the movement among and between them is as important as the aesthetic stances he achieves in each one. …

In order for the performance to be effective, however, Baudelaire would have to be alternately invested in both the rules he is drawing and the effects he achieves by their violation—violations practiced [sic] for mere shock value, without other justification or motivation, will not produce the desired effect….

—Jamison (2001, p. 280)

The wilfully sinful act of ‘breaking’ the æsthetic laws of poetic rhythm in his prose poetry and critical writings represents M. Baudelaire’s transvaluation of all æsthetic values, the reconciliation of what is ‘good’ (that is to say, ‘beautiful’) with what is ‘true’, which he finds better expressed in prose, the banal language of the fallen world of urban spleen, than in verse.

For M. Baudelaire, in “Hymne à la Beauté”, this Beauty who ‘breaks the rules with impunity’ because ‘she has all the power and answers to no authority’ comes from Satan:—‘Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme, / O Beauté?’ he asks in the very first lines, and concludes that whether she comes from Heaven or Hell is of very little import.

They are both the same, for that is the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ promised us, this eternal present of ephemeral but ever-renewing ennuis, the self-stingings we sadomasochistically insist on inflicting upon ourselves and each other on this beautiful Earth of God’s Creation.

Beauty—Horrific Beauty, Babylonian Whore—comes from Satan, the demiurgic ‘Governor’ of this Creation, our grounded, earthly prison. He is with Him and next to Him Who made it All, and thus in praising the ‘Thrice-Great Satan’ of the prefatory poem to Les Fleurs du mal, “Au Lecteur”, M. Baudelaire praises God and serves Him faithfully through his rendition unto the Cæsar of our temporal empire that which is owed him.

A new poetry for a new earth in postmodernity

If the last two terrible years have shown us anything, it is that the banality of ‘the horror’, the Kurtzian Horror of Mr. Eliot’s Waste Land, is inescapably visible, and the ‘Final Solution’ of the logic of technological Modernity—man as an eminently dispensable and disposable, replaceable part in his own infernal Machine, man as fodder for its Mammonic, Molochian jaws, the presage of which we saw at Auschwitz—is imminent.

Unless we transcend—transvaluate—break through—go beyond the false dichotomy of good and evil in our irrational psychosis of Urizenic rationality to a new, networkcentric spirit and vision of life, I fully expect us to fulfil our Faustian destiny in an epic murder-suicide pact, a global holocaust in which we destroy ourselves—and take all the world of God’s Creation with us in our overweening egotism.

As a flâneur, I walk daily in the Melburnian ruins of modernity, and the wreckage of these cliffs of glass and steel smoulders before my eyes. I trip; I fall; my cheek is smudged. Dandy that I am, I try, like M. Baudelaire, to sail gracefully above life, but I can barely keep my tie straight. That is the ‘Spleen of Melbourne’: a presentiment of the totalizing hell of failed modernity; a Cassandrian despair; a vision of apocalypse the bourgeois scoffingly disbelieves; a phantasy of universal bloodshed, of Parisian terreur and revolution in the streets.

If I am a poet in prose rather than a poet pur-sang, it is because, in the postmodern ruins of a failed modernity, I must dissect and analyse the apparently evil parts of my totalizing vision of Beauty. I must, like M. Baudelaire, attempt a transvaluation of all the misbegotten values of modernity.

A new poetic form is required to praise the banal and prosaic hell we find ourselves in, adrift without a moral compass, and love our Adversary and Tempter—the Machine of technocratic Capital we hate. A new, networkcentric ethic must be inferred from the æsthetics of that form.

Hating the ‘prose broken into lines’ which passes for postmodern ‘poetry’, perhaps it has been given to me—critic, analyst, inveterate dissector of the parts of my pleasure—to follow belatedly in M. Baudelaire’s footsteps and abstract the rules of this new poetic form from the New Nature of Absolute Artificiality which is our postmodern, urban life in economic ruins.

In essence, as a rarefication of the scientific language of prose, the prose poem ‘debunks the myth’, as Ms. Jamison puts it, through its discreet analysis of the prayer of poetry, the ‘hymn to Creation’.

The temporal, ephemeral beauties of this Creation are tempting and seductive, and in some sense, they turn our eyes from the platonic Ideal, although through them, through the artificial paradises of material beauty, poets like M. Baudelaire and myself attempt to see and say the timeless and eternal Ideal of Beauty.

We are ‘True Believers’ in a world of faithless heretics possessed by scientism’s postmodern spirit of doubt. My relationship with M. Baudelaire—spiritual, fraternal, apostolic—is of one who also walks among the pillars of the Salomonic Temple of Mystery, interpreting them, as I interpret him, to a crowd who cannot quite yet share our bizarre vision of beautiful totality in abysmal bleakness.

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