The Poetic Wound: Baudelairean Romanticism

Abstract

for Carol de Dobay Rifelj "Qui dit romantisme dit art moderne," 1 famously announces Charles Baudelaire in his writings on the Salon of 1846. If, implicitly, read historically, this declaration presents Romanticism as a precursor to modernism, it is only because the modern itself is, for Baudelaire, a transhistorical category. 2 What the poet will later dub modernité is, after all, a mode of seeing, a mode of being and, most importantly, a mode of representation suspended in a constant state of becoming. To qualify as modern, art must concentrate on what the poet designates in 1863, in his Peintre de la vie moderne, as the "élément relatif, circonstanciel" (I 1154) of beauty: "le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l'art, dont l'autre moitié est l'éternel et l'immuable" (I 1163). And like modernity, thus defined, Baudelairean romanticism takes place in a perpetual present: "S'appeler romantique et regarder systématiquement le passé, c'est se contredire" (II 420). Both terms-romanticism and the modern-signal a break with the past, offering a revision and reconstitution of what precedes them, a transposition into the contemporary idiom: "le romantisme est l'expression la plus récente, la plus actuelle du beau" (II 420). Put plainly, Romanticism is modern because it modernizes. As Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer concludes, Baudelaire's celebrated definition of Romanticism makes one thing clear at the very outset, by defining Romanticism as an alternate "way of feeling," as a novel outlook on what is already there, it signals the