the Symbolists

Charles Baudelaire cannot be counted as a 20th-century poet; he died in 1867. Still, many modern writers look to Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) as the beginning of truly modern poetry. Many of the elements were already in place (the exoticism of the Romantics, the earthiness of the Realists and Naturalists, the surrealism of Gogol and Kafka). Baudelaire took these elements new places and influenced successive generations of writers.

Although Baudelaire is often called the father of symbolist poetry, our text points out that this movement was

established in France in 1886, long after his death. Only his early sonnet, "Correspondences" (1852), picks up this old idea of universal analogy, the concept of nature as a "forest of symbols," and the idea of the unity of the senses, "synaesthesia." But the rest of Baudelaire's work shows hardly any trace of this doctrine, for which this sonnet became the key text. Rather, Baudelaire abandons all such pretensions and celebrates "modernity": "the ephemeral and fleeting beauty of modern life," life in the city, lived with detachment, irony, and even revulsion. the poet has become an outcast and at the very least an outsider, who, as a little poem in prose tells us, loses his halo in the mud of the street and does not even bother to pick it up (XLV. "Perte d'Aureole," in Petits Poemes en Prose). (2127)

The modernity of the works is in the blending of the pretty (fleurs) through occasional Romantic images and simple traditional forms such as the sonnet with the tawdry (mal) which appears in the subject matter--bleak images of the dark underbelly of the city and human relationships.

In "A Carrion" the delicate quatrains weave lush erotic images with graphic scenes of death and decay. The objectivity of the first stanza is reminiscent of the Naturalists while the light tone and simple form take their cues from the Romantics:

Remember now, my Love, what piteous thing
  We saw on a summer's gracious day:
By the roadside a hideous carrion, quivering
  On a clean bed of pebbly clay, (2130)
The "gracious day" and "pebbly clay" are lovely and playful. Contrast that with the "piteous thing" and "hideous carrion, quivering" and you feel yourself pulled simultaneously in two directions. The second stanza moves from pretty to erotic, but, again, the images of sex are woven with death:
Her legs flexed in the air like a courtesan,
  Burning and sweating venomously,
Calmly exposed its belly, ironic and wan
  Clamorous with foul ecstasy. (2130)

At this point the poem goes graphically explores rot, putrescence, but this decay, a part of the natural cycle, is matched with

This world had music, its own swift emotion
  Like water and the wind running....

From the sketch of a painter's long-neglected idyl
  Into a perfect art! (2131)

And the poem's ending, imagining the lover's eventual death and decomposition, takes up a conventional theme often found in Shakespeare's sonnets (see "Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments" for example): the poet and his art have the capacity to extend life, to keep impressions of life and events alive long after they have passed.

Several of Baudelaire's poems tangle what Freud would call libido and destrudo, a love-death connection. Baudelaire shows the animal attraction of sex against pain and decadence.

The poems also range from dreams of joy about the vitality life in the city (often dark but alive nonetheless) to lingering bouts of ennui, yearning for release from life which is self-perpetuating and meaningless. Contrast "Parisian Dreams" with "Spleen," for example. In the end Baudelaire wished for an escape from pain and boredom; his own short life was punctuated with degenerative disease. He used the pleasures that Paris had to afford as distraction. And although his poetry celebrates the urban, the vulgar, the modern by clothing it in lyrical forms, his poem "The Voyage" concludes with a need to leave a world he found ultimately empty and meaningless:

O Death, old Captain, it is time. Weigh anchor!
To sail beyond the doldrums of our days.
Though black as pitch the sea and sky, we hanker
For space; you know our hearts are full of rays.


Pour us your poison to revive our soul!
It cheers the burning quest that we pursue,
Careless if Hell or Heaven be our goal,
Beyond the known world to seek out the New! (2142)

into the 20th century

Lacking a single unifying spiritual center, the 20th century saw people looking increasingly to science and nature for direction. Social and financial institutions were (and still are) models of social Darwinism, with distinct pecking orders and separation of classes by finance rather than brute force or blue blood.

Political and philosophical thinkers, artists and writers found this reduction of the human condition to dog-eat-dog unsatisfying. All the illusions of the nobility of the human condition were being stripped away, and what was left was despair over the brutish state of human affairs. In "Dulce et Decorum est", for example, the notion that war fought for a just cause was somehow enobling was replaced with stark images of trench fighting in WWI. The focus here is the unimaginable torture and cruelty that people heap upon people and the suffering and waste that results.

T.S. Eliot's magnum poem "The Wasteland" (written around this same time) compares contemporary civilization to a barren, meaningless waste where activity is empty and purposeless and where artificial social structures have turned people into hollow puppets. (Note: there are several copies of "The Wasteland" on the WEB; here's one if you want to take a look: http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/).

Erroneously called "The war to end all wars," WWI was soon followed by WWII. Against this background the philosophy of existentialism flourished. Albert Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" uses the ancient Greek myth of the man doomed to endlessly struggle pushing a boulder up a slope only to have the rock tumble back to the base each time he nears the peak to show how life's activities are doomed never to reach any meaningful goals--they are just empty actions. This idea is certainly not new with the 20th century; several hundred years earlier Shakespeare wrote some oft-quoted scenes which compare life to mere acting (read these two famous "life as universal drama" speeches for example). Life is "a tale, / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing" (Macbeth, V, ii).

The search for meaning and purpose in all of this led artists and writers in the 20th century to experiment with one new mode after another. Inspired by new theories of psychoanalysis, physics and metaphysics, games theory, gestalt, and so forth, the variety of expression in the 20th century was phenomenal. At the very least, the new uncertainties about life, the universe, and everything opened the door to incredible creativity. Samuel Becket, for example, reduced the human condition to absurdly insubstantial attempts to invent meaning through interaction. His Waiting for Godot burlesques the range of activities that humans engage in while they wait for (Godot, "God") to invest this activity with purpose. In his Endgame (which is in our text), the characters mark time as entropy takes hold; their behaviors mimic the endgame of a chess match--governed by artificially-created rules and an invented meaning. Several counter-cultures grew out of this uncertainty; the anti-establishment Beat Generation, living through civil unrest in an age when nuclear annihilation was a genuine threat, produced brilliant/angry rants such as Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". One of the funnest (?) expressions of the difficulty of producing meaningful communication in a world full of isolated individuals is Julio Cortazar's "Blow-Up" (Note: I strongly recommend both the short story and the very different film version by Michelangelo Antonioni). The short story opens,

It'll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing. If one might say: I will see the moon rose, or: we hurt me at the back of my eyes, and especially: you the blond woman was the clouds that race before my your his our yours their faces. What the hell.   (trans. by Paul Blackburn)

What the heck, indeed! Left with an idios kosmos (a personal view and sense of the world), stripped of a koinos kosmos (a world-view shared by all people), how does one communicate meaningfully? Often wordplay, as in the passage above, became the content as well as the form of a work. In Cortazar's story the main character is a writer/photographer who views the world through the narrow lens of a camera, much as Heather in The Blair Witch Project. This limited point-of-view makes any other means of seeing the world impossible. The individual lives in personal illusion, opinion, abstraction, limited to just that knowledge that passes in front of "the lens."

It's frustrating. Then again, life with free thought is more frustrating (not worse, necessarily, just more complicated) than a life dictated by common rules and beliefs. Still, it's not completely filled with despair. In his "Myth of Sisyphus" Camus shows that the struggle can be heroic; much depends on the belief in the possibility of reaching the crest of the hill. And the Renaissance writer reducing human action to the actions of players on a stage does not suggest we give up; after all, Shakespeare also penned

"The play's the thing." (Hamlet, II, ii)