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CLASSICS REVISITED (9)
Baudelaire, Poems
Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Rimbaud, Poems
“Baudelaire is the greatest poet of the capitalist epoch.” True or not, this
statement, with its Marxist implications, is appropriate, because he is specially the poet
of the society analyzed in Capital or described in The Condition of the
English Working Class. His subject was the world of primitive accumulation, of the
ruthless destruction of all values but the cash nexus by the new industrial and financial
system — of bankers and their mistresses in sultry boudoirs; of the craze for
diabolism, drugs, flagellation, barbarism; of gin-soaked poor dying in gutters,
prostitutes dying under bridges, tubercular and syphilitic intellectuals; of the immense,
incurable loneliness of the metropolis; of the birth of human self-alienation, as Marx
called it — Baudelaire called it vaporization of the Ego — of the Communist
Manifesto; and of revolution and revolution betrayed.
Baudelaire’s Catholic apologists deny that he had an Oedipus complex. He is the
archetype, a far more extreme example than Rousseau or Stendhal. Yet neither Marx nor
Freud is an adequate guide to Baudelaire. They diagnose the illness of the nineteenth
century in its own materialistic terms. Far more afflicted than they, Baudelaire
transcends his century. His ultimate meanings are emerging only in the decline of the
twentieth. He is the founder of the modern sensibility — not just of that of its
first century, but of a special character that will, as far as we can see ahead, endure
throughout the age of the breakdown of our civilization. Some learn to cope with this
sensibility. He was at its mercy, because he embodied it totally. He lived in a permanent
crisis of the moral nervous system. His conviction that social relationships were one
immense lie was physiological.
The Romantics had a rhetoric of secession; Baudelaire had a life commitment, an organic
divorce. Further, he was literally outcast — expelled from his caste. Few men have
ever had a stronger conviction of their clerisy, of their belonging to the clerkly caste
of the responsibles. Yet because of the terms of his wardship, he was continually
dispossessed, forced to recognize his loss and shame every time he had to beg from his
mother or his guardian. His writing, which he looked on as prophetic utterance, he was
forced to sell as a cheap commodity. At the end of his life he told a friend he had
received a total of about three thousand dollars from all the writing he had ever done.
He spent his life in a state of demoralization, and his work is a relentless attack on
that demoralization. Much of his life and most of his poetry are tortured by a
consciousness of sin. He thought of sin as the corruption of the will to vision. Only very
rarely does he ever seem to realize that it is the corruption of the organ of reciprocity.
His human relationships are all charades.
It has been said that Baudelaire chose the life he lived, that nobody has to live like
that. True, but what did he choose? He did not choose his degrading trust fund, his
Hamletic relation with his mother, his obsessive ritualized oral sex and masochism, or his
syphilis, all of which worked together to multiply his guilt, to close to him
person-to-person relations with women, and to turn women into melodramatic actresses in
his own internal theater of frustration. Nor did he choose a debilitating oral opium
addiction; in youth he chose the ecstasies of drugs before he realized the consequences
— not just painful addiction, but destruction of the will, and a vaporisation de
Moi worse than that caused by the dehumanizations of a commercial society.
He chose to place himself at the disposal of experience, and he chose to place his
experience at the mercy of a conscience conceived as an instrument of mystery and a key to
the enigma of being. Transports, ecstasies, orgies — what is the secret? The poet,
says Baudelaire, is a decipherer, a Kabbalist of reality, a decoder. Ordinary life, if it
is not a message in code, a system of symbols for something else, is unacceptable. It must
be a cryptogram; it can’t be what it seems. The poet’s task is to decode the
incomprehensible obvious. His life becomes a deliberately constructed paranoia, as
Rimbaud, Breton, Artaud were to say generations later.
As we read him we discover that Baudelaire believes in the charm, the incantation, the
cryptogram, but he ceases to believe in the secret. The spirits have not risen. The code
says nothing. This is the mystery concealed by the disorder of the world. The visionary
experience ends in itself; the light of the illuminated comes only from and falls only on
himself. This is not unlike Buddhism in its starkest form, the end result of a rigorous
religious empiricism — which is why similar minds find him so congenial today.
Baudelaire liked to call his verse Classical, and gullible modern critics echo him. It
is not, although it is so Latinate as to begin the corruption of logical syntax that
reaches its culmination in Mallarmé and Reverdy. It is ritualistic; the tonic patterns of
French verse are flattened out, and a reverberating sonority of vowel music as in English
or Medieval Latin takes their place. A poem like “La Cloche Fêlée” is written
Gregorian chant — “media vitae, in the midst of life we are in
death.”
Nor is Baudelaire the poet of the modern megalopolis in any realistic sense. Corpses
spilling worms in the ditch, ancient courtesans cackling over gaming tables in the dawn,
boulevards lit with prostitutes, Negresses lost in the winter fog, sweaty lesbians in beds
dizzy with perfume, a wounded soldier dying under a heap of dead — is this everyday
life in the modern city? It is the city as the mother of hallucinations of the alienated.
He presents it with the utmost tension of abstract and concrete, “in a noble,
distant, superior manner,” said Laforgue — a hieratic manner, the manner of a
priest. He claimed the power of transubstantiation — “Paris, you gave me mud,
and I turned it to gold and gave it back to you.”
It has been said that Baudelaire, like Blake, had no philosophy, or had to make one up
out of himself. Like Blake, he states his philosophy clearly enough. It is the orthodoxy
of the heterodox, older far than Aquinas or even Plato. Correspondences, the doubled
world, the doctrine of signatures, the ambivalence of microcosm and macrocosm — he
found all these notions in Swedenborg; some in Coleridge; some in Poe; all in Blake, whom
he may have read; and all worked out in vulgarized detail by his friend Eliphas Lévi, the
founder of modern occultism.
More sophisticated, more desperate than his masters, Baudelaire uses his gnosticism in
an anti-gnostic sense, to contradict itself. Man is not saved by knowledge; gnosis
does not produce ecstasis, but vice versa. Vision produces the knowledge of the
irrelevance of knowledge, a state of being beyond the vaporized ego, beyond the temporal
order, an end in itself. This is the secret of clerisy, of the sanior pars, the
saving remnant of doom. It is the substance of a new ordination.
In youth he called the disengaged man of conscience the Dandy. As he grew older, the
Dandy merged with a new kind of priest or shaman. His clerkly role explains his
distinctive dress, his strange caste standards, far more strict than those prevailing
amongst les autres, peculiar to the clergy — “benefit of clergy”
— a people set apart.
He chose the life that enabled him to do what he did. Above all other writers, poetry
was to him a vocation, a calling to a new kind of holy orders. So to the degree to which
he could manage it, his life was monastic — like the celibacy of the brothel: an
almost complete sacrifice of domesticity and the amenities of secular man to the
liberation and refinement of a sensibility and a conscience that he considered synonymous.
He insists on the poet and artist as vates; as the visionary eye of the body
politic, as he says explicitly; as the priest who sacrifices himself and atones
vicariously for The Others.
* * *
There are no satisfactory verse translations of Baudelaire. The best way to read him if
you have no French is with a prose pony, as in the Penguin edition by Francis Scarfe.
There are excellent translations of the prose, which should all be read —
there’s not so much.
[Another Rexroth essay on Baudelaire]
[Diverse
translations of a Baudelaire poem]
Our civilization is the only one in history whose major artists have rejected all its
values. Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoievsky, Melville, Mark
Twain — all are self-alienated outcasts. One nineteenth-century writer of world
importance successfully refused alienation, yet still speaks significantly to us: Walt
Whitman, the polar opposite of Baudelaire.
Most intellectuals of our generation think of America as the apotheosis of commercial,
competitive middle-class society. Because Whitman found within it an abundance of just
those qualities which it seems today most to lack, the sophisticated read him little and
are inclined to dismiss him as fraudulent or foolish. The realization of the American
Dream as an apocalypse, an eschatological event which would give the life of man its
ultimate significance, was an invention of Whitman’s.
In our own day, when the term is a badly soiled shibboleth, it is difficult to take it
seriously. Other religions have been founded on the promise of the Community of Love, the
Abode of Peace, the Kingdom of God. Whitman identified it with his own Nation-State. We
excuse such ideas only when they began three thousand years ago in the Levantine desert.
In our own time we suspect them of dangerous malevolence. Yet Whitman’s vision
exposes and explodes all the frauds that pass for the American Way of Life. It is the last
and greatest vision of the American potential.
Today, when intellectuals and politicians hold each other in supreme contempt, few
remember that America was founded by, and for three generations ruled by, intellectuals.
As they were driven from power in the years before the Civil War, their vision of a
practicable utopia diffused out into society; went underground; surfaced again in
co-operative colonies, free-love societies, labor banks, vegetarianism, feminism,
Owenites, Fourierists, Saint-Simonians, Anarchists, dozens of religious communal sects.
Whitman was formed in this environment. Whenever he found it convenient, he spoke of
himself as a Quaker and used Quaker language. Much of his strange lingo is not the stilted
rhetoric of the self-taught but simply Quaker talk. Most of his ideas were commonplaces in
the radical and pietistic circles and the Abolition Movement. This was the first American
Left, for whom the Civil War was a revolutionary war and who after it was over refused to
believe that it was not a won revolution.
Unfortunately for us, as is usually the case in won revolutions, their language turned
into a kind of Newspeak. The vocabulary of Whitman’s moral epic has been debauched by
a hundred years of editorials and political speeches. Still, there are two faces to the
coin of Newspeak: the counterfeit symbol of power and the golden face of liberty. The
American Dream that is the subject of Leaves of Grass is again becoming
believable as the predatory society that has intervened between us and Whitman passes
away.
Walt Whitman’s democracy is utterly different from the society of free rational
contractual relationships inaugurated by the French Revolution. It is a community of men
related by organic satisfactions, in work, love, play, the family, comradeship — a
social order whose essence is the liberation and universalization of selfhood. Leaves
of Grass is not a great work of art just because it has a great program, but it does
offer point-by-point alternatives to the predatory society, as well as to the systematic
doctrine of alienation from it that has developed from Baudelaire and Kierkegaard to the
present.
In all of Whitman’s many celebrations of labor, abstract relations are never
mentioned. Money appears only to be scorned. Sailors, carpenters, longshoremen,
bookkeepers, seamstresses, engineers, artists — all seem to be working for
“nothing,” participants in a universal creative effort in which each discovers
his ultimate individuation. The day’s work over, they loaf and admire the world
singly on summer hillsides, blowing on leaves of grass; or strolling the quiet First Day
streets of Manhattan, arms about each other’s broad shoulders; or making love in
religious ecstasy. Unlike almost all other ideal societies, Whitman’s utopia, which
he calls “these states,” is not a projection of the virtues of an idealized past
into the future, but an attempt to extrapolate the future into the American present. His
is a realized eschatology.
The Middle Ages called hope a theological virtue. They meant that, with faith and love,
it was essential to the characteristic being of mankind. Now hope is joy in the presence
of the future in the present. On this joy creative effort depends, because creation
relates past, present, and future in concrete acts which result in enduring objects and
experiences. Beyond the consideration of time, Whitman asserts the same principle of
being, the focusing of the macrocosm in the microcosm — or its reverse, which is the
same thing — as the source of individuation. Again and again he identifies himself
with a transfigured America, the community of work in love and love in work; this
community with the meaning of the universe, the vesture of God; a great chain of being
which begins, or ends, in Walt Whitman, or his reader — Adam-Kadmon, who contains all
things — ruled in order by love.
Whitman’s philosophy may resemble that of the Upanishads as rewritten by
Thomas Jefferson. What differentiates it is the immediacy of substantial vision, the
intensity of the wedding of image and moral meaning. Although Whitman is a philosophical
poet, almost always concerned with his message, he is at the same time a master of
Blake’s “minute particulars,” one of the clearest and most dramatic
imagists in literature. Blake himself, in the philosophical-mythological epics in which he
confronts the same problems and seeks the same solutions as Whitman, is graphic enough,
but the details of his invented cosmogony are not sufficiently believable and so soon
become boring. Whitman found his cosmogony under his heel, all about him in the most
believable details of mundane existence. So his endless lists of the facts of life, which
we expect to be tedious, are instead exhilarating, especially if read aloud.
Not least of the factors of Whitman’s greatness is his extraordinary verse. He was
influenced, it is true, by Isaiah, Ossian, and all the other sources discovered by
scholarship. His has influenced all the cadenced verse that has come after it. Yet in fact
there has never been anything like Whitman’s verse before or since. It was original
and remains inimitable. It is the perfect medium for poetic homilies on the divinization
of man.
Only recently it was fashionable to dismiss Whitman as foolish and dated, a believer in
the myth of progress and the preacher of an absurd patriotism. Today we know that it is
Whitman’s vision or nothing. “Mankind, the spirit of the Earth, the paradoxical
conciliation of the element with the whole and of unity with multitude — all these
are called utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary. For them to be incarnated in
the world, all we may need is to imagine our power of loving developing until it embraces
the total of man and of the earth.” So said Teilhard de Chardin; or as Whitman says
in the great mystical poems that are the climax of his book, contemplation is the highest
form and the ultimate source of all moral activity, because it views all things in their
timeless aspect, through the eyes of love.
“Les Phares” they have been called, the lighthouses that guide the course of
modern poetry and, following poetry, all the other arts. They are Blake, Hölderlin, Poe,
Baudelaire, Whitman, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Reverdy, Breton, Artaud. Most of
them are slightly mad. Some — notably Poe, Breton, and Artaud — are not even
very good poets. Most of them were incapable of competing with the world on its own terms.
They were not competent in any accepted definition of the word. Whitman was sane and
healthy enough, even normal — if one is not a prig — although he was a little
foolish at times. Only Rimbaud and Apollinaire were supremely competent, able to make
their own way against all comers whatever the circumstances, and Apollinaire was much the
lesser man. He was a successful hack, as Poe was an unsuccessful one, a kind of
petty-bourgeois adventurer in letters — alongside a career as a great poet.
Rimbaud was cut from a far vaster cloth — another Clive or Cecil Rhodes, a robber
baron like the men who ruthlessly hurled railroads across the mountains and deserts of
America. That he failed was not his fault. He chose, unwittingly, to operate in a theater
of impossible conditions. The regions from the Red Sea to Addis Ababa were intrinsically
incapable of being developed like South Africa or Australia or the Far West, and have
remained so to this day. Rimbaud did not fail as a capitalist adventurer in Africa. He was
defeated by a mistake in geography and then was brought low by cancer. Had he not died in
what after all was still late youth, he might well have a rebel republic in the heart of
Africa named after him today. Great mathematicians do their best work in early youth,
because the intellectual lures of mathematics wear out after a few years. Entrepreneurs
and imperialists usually develop late. It takes time to become as wily as a fox, as
impervious as a turtle, and as supple as a snake. All who met Rimbaud in Africa agree that
he had learned his lessons superlatively when death seized him by the knee.
Almost all the books on Rimbaud, and there are about six hundred in French and English
alone, autobiographize, if the barbarism may be forgiven, his poetry. The books are
written by writers, and Rimbaud’s life shocks writers. He grew up in a drab
provincial town in the worst part of France. He was a brilliant and unruly child, no worse
and no better than any other boy with brains fallen amongst the brainless. The only
opportunity for escape in such a place was the public library. There he discovered not
just poetry, but the extraordinary claims of the poetics of late Romanticism.
He immediately applied the recipes to himself, and since he took them literally and
acted on them with superlative vigor and intelligence, the results were astonishing. Not
only were they epoch-making — they are still making epochs. The reason is simple: no
one before had ever really believed the claims of the poets, and no poet had ever before
had either the brains or the muscle to act on such impossibilist claims if he had believed
them.
After a brief correspondence with the poets he admired and believed — alas,
stuffed shirts like Théodore de Banville and debauched amateur nuns like Verlaine —
Rimbaud ran off three different times to make his way amongst the great in Paris. He
succeeded only in embarrassing and frightening them. The first time, he was arrested and
returned in ignominy to his home. His second visit coincided with the fall of France and
the arrival of the German armies; his third, with the Commune. Like Whitman’s
adventures in the Civil War, Rimbaud’s in the Commune seem to be largely imaginary.
But he did see through the Commune. He came to it believing all its rhetorical
pretensions; he left totally disillusioned.
This was April 1871. In May he had transferred all these apocalyptic, eschatological
hopes and visions to poetry. This is the month in which he wrote his two “Letters of
a Visionary,” to his teacher Izambard and his friend Demeny. They are the most
extreme statement of the prophetic, shamanistic, vatic role of the poet in the literature
of any language to that date. It would be most illuminating to see the vanished answers
from these two small, provincial people — both letters anticipate the answers that
must have come. They are not only aesthetic programs; they are apocalyptic visions and
calls to action. Rimbaud attacks with all the fury of the visionary who sees an onrushing
apocalypse that his contemporaries refuse to even notice. “Judgment, and after the
Judgment, the Fire.” He seduced the will-less and witless Verlaine, and for two years
tried to make him the poet he claimed to be — by the sheer exercise of erotic force.
Within three years Rimbaud was to learn that he had been the victim of a hoax. The
poets he met were not Isaiahs but drunken Scribes and Pharisees. The apocalypse was
delayed, and its omens died away. Poetry turned out not to be a sufficient vehicle for a
total overturn of the human consciousness and a transvaluation of reality. So Rimbaud
turned away from poetry as an insufficient vehicle of his ambitions. He was twenty years
old.
No one else has ever had the faith, the hope, and the lack of charity to attack poetry
the way Rimbaud did. No one else with so much strength and intelligence has ever had the
innocence to take all of its most extravagant claims with complete seriousness. Rimbaud
tried to do to and with poetry what others only pretended — when talking to adoring
women and other customers — to be able to do. Poetry has never recovered. To say it
has never been the same since is not slang, but simple fact.
Baudelaire may have founded modern poetry, but his work is assimilable to the past
— to Coleridge, or Maurice Scève, or Catullus, or Petronius, or Webster, or Marlowe,
or whom you will. With Rimbaud, the connections are snapped. The only poetry like
Rimbaud’s is to be found amongst primitive peoples who believe as did the boy
Rimbaud, really and truly, that the poet is an all-powerful shaman and seer, capable of
altering the very nature of reality. It does no good to hunt for other Rimbauds amongst
the more deranged Romantics; they are to be found amongst the Eskimos, the Kwakiutls, the
Chukchis, the Kamchatals; amongst the founders of ecstatic cults in China and Japan, where
some poetry of this sort has made its way into literature; and amongst a very few, far
fewer than you would think, Medieval European ecstatics, like Saint Hildegarde of Bingen
and Saint Mechtild of Magdeburg.
What did Rimbaud accomplish in poetry? He developed, refined, and pushed to its final
forms the basic technique of all verse that has been written since in the idiom of
international modernism — the radical disassociation, analysis, and recombination of
all the material elements of poetry. This means all, not just the syntactical structure.
True, the logical pattern of Western European thought and language begins to break down.
The basic form — subject, verb, object, and their modifiers — dissolves. The
prosody dissolves too, into doggerel, free verse, and a new kind of incantatory prose
quite unlike Baudelaire’s. The whole tendency of the prosody is toward hypnotic
incantation and invocation of delusion — acoustic magic.
More important by far, however, the ultimate materials, psychological, descriptive,
dramatic — the things the poetry is “about” — are shattered beyond
recognition and recombined into forms that establish the conviction of a new and different
order of reality. The subject and the poetic situation are liquidated. It is impossible to
say who the actors in the room are, or where they are, or what is happening to them —
not in terms of any pattern of the real world brought to the poem from previous
experience. The poem is closed within its own dramaturgy.
This is why most critics insist on interpreting Rimbaud’s poetry in terms of his
own life. Superficially, this often works. Certainly “Bateau Ivre” is a poem of
an adolescent boy with his head full of cowboys and Indians, pirates and cannibals.
Certainly it is possible to read, with the help of a little vulgar Freudianism, most of
the erotic poems as records of the visions and disappointments of masturbation.
All this is too easy and produces an easy Rimbaud. Best to take the poems at face
value, to forget about the struggles with Verlaine when reading “Une Saison en
Enfer” or the sodomizing cannoneers of the Commune in their rowdy barracks when
reading the bitter, cryptically obscene poems and the “Illumination” called
“Democratie.” Rimbaud may never have seen the Commune and may well not have had
any genuine homosexual affair with Verlaine. The poems are all about something else.
“Je suis un autre,” said Rimbaud.
By the time we get to the paintings of Juan Gris, or the poems of Pierre Reverdy,
Rimbaud’s philosophy of composition has been brought under cool control. It has, so
to speak, entered the period of Plato, Aristotle, or even Aquinas. But behind Plato lies
the demonic Socrates, whom nobody could understand, but only systematize. Rimbaud is stout
Cortes, not silent on a peak in Darien, but walking into the streets and plazas of
Tenochtitlán, into a universe of wonder.
To achieve the dissolution and dissociation of all the elements of poetry, it was
necessary for Rimbaud to undertake a forced dissociation of the personality — under
the strict control of a powerful will and reason. This is the “reasoned derangement
of the senses” which has become a byword of all modern art.
In Rimbaud it is commonly accompanied, and always in his best poems, by the phenomena
of dissolution of the personality that are found in natural mysticism and in trance states
that result from toxins — whether drugs, or the products of fasting, or manipulation
of the breath and the autonomic nervous system. Cyclones, explosions, blue lights,
shattering crystals, colored snow, whirling sparks, shipwrecks, whirlpools, the looming of
an alternative reality behind the fiction of the real, the sense of estrangement of the
self “The true life is absent.” “I am another.”
It is this vocabulary which is common to Saint Hildegard, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé,
which has led so many to worship Rimbaud as a diabolic saint, just as it has led so many
in our time to confuse the similar effects of hallucinogenic drugs with mystical visions
of ultimate reality.
Rimbaud did not see the Absolute, or try to become an angel, or any of the other things
his worshipers attribute to him. He very simply tried to take the pretensions of poetry
seriously and to reform art so that it could alter the experienced meaning of reality. He
decided that this was a hoax and an activity beneath the dignity of grown men, and he
turned to what he considered more interesting activities. However, he almost succeeded,
and poetry will never be the same again.
* * *
The translations and the books about Rimbaud in English are of doubtful guidance. They
are all weakened by adherence to one or another of the Rimbaud myths. We badly need a
translation of the devastating critique of Étiemble. Best read two or more face en
face translations and puzzle out the French with a dictionary. Wallace Fowlie’s
recent critical book is pretty much a repetition of the now very dated pseudo-Thomist
criticism of Jacques Maritain. However, his translation is usually trustworthy, and it is
complete.
[Another Rexroth essay on
Rimbaud]
Selections from Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited (copyright 1968
Kenneth Rexroth) and More Classics Revisited (copyright 1989 Kenneth Rexroth
Trust). Reproduced by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Both of these volumes are in print and available from New Directions. Do yourself a favor and get them.
[Other “Classics Revisited” essays]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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