The new economic relations that created vast urban areas and a consumer culture thus had a direct impact on the way poets perceived their surroundings. Yet Baudelaire aimed not at a sociological analysis of the city but at a poetry that could express the new experience of the city-dweller, Poe’s “man of the crowd.” In his essay on the dandy, the idle man who strolls about town, Baudelaire celebrated the “cult of the ego” and typified the modern urban experience of viewing the world as if through the plate glass of a shop window. Baudelaire translated Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories into French and wrote several poems about Paris (“seething city, city full of dreams”), peopled with figures like the “red-haired beggar girl,” the “hideous Jewess,” the “consumptive negress,” and the drunken ragpicker.
His most infamous love poem, “A Carrion,” describes in detail the rotting corpse of an animal, with its “legs flexed in the air like a courtesan.” The poet reminds his beloved that after her death, “even you will come to this foul shame, / This ultimate infection,” thus making disgustingly literal the traditional poetic theme of the fleetingness of earthly love. Like Flaubert, Baudelaire was rebuked by the court for his “realism.” The judges held that some of his poems “necessarily lead to the excitement of the senses by a crude realism offensive to public decency.” The poet had already distanced himself from Courbet’s visual realism, and the court was using the term in a very general sense, but Baudelaire’s fascination with the detritus of urban life did chime in with realist concerns. The ban was not officially lifted until 1949, by which time Baudelaire had achieved “classic” status as among the most important influences on modern literature in France and throughout Europe.
The court banned six of Baudelaire’s erotic poems, two of them on lesbian themes and the other four heterosexual but mildly sado-masochistic. In August of 1857, the French lawyer who had prosecuted Gustave Flaubert, Ernest Pinard, had greater success in prosecuting Charles Baudelaire for The Flowers of Evil ( Les Fleurs du Mal) (1857).
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