Declamation is the spine of Baudelaire’s verse. Declamation gives the verse the posture it presents to the world— self-consciously, with the assumption of an audience that expects of it an authority, a dignity, and a pride reflected in its register and diction as well as in its measure and cadence. Here, for instance, are some of the most famous lines of “Le Cygne” (I follow all Baudelaire poems with a prose translation by Keith Waldrop, which holds each stanza together as a paragraph)[i]:

Un cygne qui s'était évadé de sa cage,
Et, de ses pieds palmés frottant le pavé sec,
Sur le sol raboteux traînait son blanc plumage.
Près d'un ruisseau sans eau la bête ouvrant le bec

Baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre,
Et disait, le coeur plein de son beau lac natal:
«Eau, quand donc pleuvras-tu? quand tonneras-tu, foudre?»
Je vois ce malheureux, mythe étrange et fatal,

Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l'homme d'Ovide,
Vers le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu,
Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tête avide
Comme s'il adressait des reproches à Dieu!

A swan, escaped from his cage, webbed feet scuffling the dry pavement, white plumage trailing the rough ground. Near a waterless brook the beast, with open beak,

bathed irritably in the dust, saying—heart full with the beauty of his native lake— "Waters, when will you rain down? when, lightning, will you thunder?" I see that wretched creature, strange myth of fate,

sometimes, like Ovid's humans, tilt a greedy head on a quivering neck, toward the sky, toward the cruelly blue ironic sky, as if reproaching God!

Not even, the classicist and critic Donald Carne-Ross remarked, “an Irish Yeatsian swan could address the heavens in this grand way without a touch of absurdity.”[ii] But what makes the poem especially tricky for English readers is that Baudelaire’s language, in his proper voice, is supported by the same declamatory conventions as the lines of verse issuing from the swan. Even when Baudelaire is most given to reverie and when the poems do not follow the classical French Alexandrine, the posture is upright, controlled, self-possessed, as in “Invitation au Voyage”:

Des meubles luisants,
Polis par les ans,
Décoreraient notre chambre;
Les plus rares fleurs
Mêlant leurs odeurs
Aux vagues senteurs de l'ambre,
Les riches plafonds,
Les miroirs profonds,
La splendeur orientale,
Tout y parlerait
À l'âme en secret
Sa douce langue natale.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

Gleaming furniture, polished by years passing, would ornament our bedroom; the rarest flowers, their odors sagely mixed with amber, rich ceilings, deep mirrors, an Oriental splendor—everything there would address our souls privately, in their sweet native tongue.

There there's only order, beauty, abundant, calm, voluptuous.

Though the opening of the poem invokes a second person, and though the poem is occasioned by her presence, it does not aim to work on that person or even to work on anyone in particular at all. If we understand rhetoric as a persuasive device, this is not rhetoric: nobody is being persuaded. It feels instead closer to reverie, as if Baudelaire were giving himself over to his desire, but the close-cut lines and sustained focus suggest instead a willed concentration of attention. Perhaps, then, it would be better to speak of vatic trance than of reverie—except that he does address another person, is conscious of her, and of more than her, an audience. In other words, it is not Swinburne. Even here, then, we should be able to detect, hushed though it is, a declamatory style; it is a norm towards which and from which Baudelaire’s voice moves, not always fully embodying it, but always aware of the possibility of doing so.

To readers of English verse, declamation suggests volume, a voice carrying out over an assembled public or extending into the reaches of the heavens. For the former, see Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” and for the latter, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”  The seventh section of Tennyson’s Ode:

A people’s voice! we are a people yet

Tho’ all men else their nobler dreams forget.

Confused by brainless mobs and lawless Powers.

Thank Him who isled is here, and roughly set

His Briton in blown seas and storming showers.

We have a voice with which to pay the debt

Of boundless love and reverence and regret

To those great men who fought, and kept it ours.

And it keep it ours, O God, from brute control!

O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul

Of Europe, keep our noble England whole.

It is no small achievement that, writing after the Romantic generations, Tennyson makes such a style available to English for public occasions. It’s easy now to deride as crown-pleasing toadyism his role as laureate, but he restores (maybe even invents) a register in English verse that was not available before. We don’t complain when an architect revives a style of public buildings that is continuous with the past but also serves a modern need; Tennyson’s declamatory “Ode” is classical without being pastiche. But it is not intimate, not inwards, and the most ruminative of Tennyson’s verses, In Memoriam and Maud, depend on implied solitude and even isolation (from Hallam; from a class). Where In Memoriam raises its voice to declaim (“Ring in”), it is a conscious turning away from the turmoil of feelings; where Maud raises its voices, it is, to use T.S. Eliot’s word in his essay on Tennyson, more “shrill” than declamation should be, imploring and crying. As a poet, Tennyson was imaginatively invigorated by the public dimensions of voice, but the most searching exploration he undertakes, in “Ulysses,” is a beautiful example not of declamation but of persuasion, a rhetorical seduction of a crowd of followers towards an action that, though suicidal—or because suicidal—offers the last remaining possibility of heroism in their lives. Some poets would recoil from their lines being taken out of context and set in public for a purpose they could not conceive, but Tennyson—though he might have chewed dourly on his pipe—would, I think, have been able to recognize that when the closing lines of “Ulysses” were selected for the walls of London’s Olympic Village, it was true to their spirit: inspiring but deviously designed to stir the will rather than the mind:

                  Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.     (ll.65-70)

This is public exhortation rather than declamation. It speaks to an audience, not in the awareness of an audience; it seeks to create an occasion rather than fulfilling an occasion. The posture of the speaker here, if we can imagine it, stands tall but leans into an audience. He does not take for granted, but instead seeks to establish, his place and power. Declamation, on the other hand, is an assured demonstration that one has mastered the powers of civilization and decorum and so is suited to mastering the world. Laurent Pernot, in The Subtle Subtext, explains that declamation in Ancient Greece and Rome was “a speech on a fictional subject, set as an exercise, to allow students to work on the theoretical rules that had been rilled into them.” Soon though, it became so well-established and prized that it “broke out of classroom confines and became a type of popular entertainment, when students and their professors went before large audiences of their relatives, friends, and the curious.”[iii] It is a mode that requires or assumes the validation of a public but that does not aim to operate on, or transform, that public.

Baudelaire’s “Invitation au Voyage” can be heard in a seductive whisper, while also retaining the steadiness of total self-possession, even in the throes of reverie. It is, in other words, the proof that what Norbert Elias referred to as the civilizing process is complete, the impulses of desire and violence subdued and controlled by manners and conventions. Elias, not coincidentally, wrote at length of the rituals of the French court, too, the etiquette and decorum that defined the salons of the seventeenth century and descended through the eighteenth, fostering the philosophes, surviving the revolution, and flourishing still in Baudelaire’s Paris (Flaubert’s disciple Maupassant sat at his feet in one; Proust delights in a salon’s  potential for comedy).[iv] We do not associate declamation with the salon, and Baudelaire does not ask that his verse be read as “society verse,” suitable for the salon of his day. But he discerns in the critical stance, detachment, and aestheticism of the nineteenth-century salon the rarefied codes of seventeenth-century court life, the flower of the civilizing process, subordinating passion and appetite to etiquette and decorum. Elias explains, with the seventeenth century in mind, that “the immense value attached to the demonstration of prestige and the observance does not betray an attachment to externals, but to what was vitally important to individual identity,” which is the position of individuals in relation to others in the mutually sustaining web of the court.[v] The individual exists as an individual before others, in a shared public existence which becomes internalized, a ground of identity and psychology. This is the ground, or stage, upon which the greatest of French tragedians, Racine, sets his plots in motion. Racine’s dramas, with which Baudelaire would have been intimately familiar, had crowned the seventeenth century, and they had also perfected the art of declamation, using it to bring to view the full range of volumes, tones, and sentiments.  Here is Phèdre:

Ah! Douleur non encore éprouvée!

À quell nouveau tourment je me suis réservée!

Tout ce que j’ai souffert, mes craintes, mes transports,

La fureur de mes feux, l’horreuer de mes remords,

Et d’un cruel refuse l’insupportable injure,

N’était qu’un faible essai du tourment que j’endure.

Ils s’aiment! Par quelle charme ont-ils trompé mes yeux?

Comment se sont-ils vus? depuis quand? dans quell lieux?

Tu le savais: pourquoi me laissais-tu séduire?

De leur furtive ardeur ne pouvais-tu m’instruire?

Les a-t-on vus souvent se parler, se chercher?

Dans le fond des forêts allaient-ils se cacher?

Hélas! Ils se voyaient avec pleine license:

Le ciel de leurs soupirs approvait l’innocence;

Ils suivaient sans remords leur penchant amoreux;

Tous les jours se levaient clairs et sereins pour eux!

Et moi, triste rebut de la nature entire,

Je me cachais au jour, je fuyais la lumière;

La mort est le seul dieu que j’osais implorer.  (IV.6.1270-1290)

Ah! Pain unknown until this moment! to what new torment have I been reserved? All that I have suffered—my fears, my passionate outbursts, the frenzy of my longing, the horror of my remorse, even the unbearable insult of a cruel refusal—all this was but a pale foretaste of the agony I now endure. They love each other! By what enchantment did they deceive my eyes? How did they come to meet? Since when? And where? You knew it—why did you let me be misled? Could you not have warned me of their furtive passion? Have they been often seen speaking, seeking each other out? Did they hide in the depths of the forest? Alas! They met in full freedom; heaven itself approved the innocence of their sighs. They followed their loving inclinations without remorse; each day rose bright and serene for them! But I—sad outcast of all nature—I shunned the day, I fled from the light; death was the only god I dared implore.

On the stage, the actress would remain poised, limited in movement, the voice modulating but remaining in the service of the meter; she would recite for the audience as well as her interlocutor on stage (Oenone, in this case). Phèdre knows herself to be on view but she does not self-dramatize. Instead, the play implies an argument about the passions and power: those who are (or who have been) most civilized, and who are suited to rule, are capable of the control required to bring into public view—as declamation does—what would otherwise be rendered pitiably inward and unexpressed. There are several claims being made: that to be civilized is to live a life of public accountability, not only scrutinized on ethical but on stylistic grounds; that to be civilized allows one to stand at the center of society, to avoid eccentricities of diction or style, and to expose oneself with dignity and even glory. Phèdre is confused by her incestuous desire for her stepson, and her full collapse takes place soon after this speech, but so long as she is on stage, her swirling depth of feeling, even if never fully brought to light and certainly never calmed, does not break her style; declamation preserves her up to the point of destruction. Civilization grants her the strength to persevere to her end by bringing into the open the source of her fatal illness; even when she deceives herself, or others, in what she says, her declamation makes her confusion limpid and acceptable for view. Though her love violates the social law, her manner of confessing upholds it. And the limpid directness of her lines—an example of the French classical high style—contrasts with the obscure sources of desire, reminding of us of all that cannot be uttered, not because it is taboo, but because it lies beyond speech.

                  Baudelaire sees that in Racine, individuals are embodiments of civilization, able to stand apart from their own suffering as works of art, even as they disintegrate from within. Declamation does not seek to persuade; it seeks to detach, with an awareness of world on the one hand, audience on the other, situating itself apart from both. It does not dramatize, but it follows a script. It is not histrionic, but it is a conscious performance, since the civilized self is always a performance. In Racine, the passions are the occasion and object of language: they permit the artistry of the civilized self to show itself, and to show its power, when they overflow the acceptable social channels. In Baudelaire, something similar happens, but it is not the passions that overflow, but his curiosity and desires that transgress, attaching themselves to objects and moments that ought not to be spoken, and to find within them the glimpses of beauty, emptiness, eternity, and fallenness that affirm the reality of the soul. He glimpses the abyss. But he cannot plunge into it and does not invite us to do so; instead, he brings us to the edge and gestures for all to see, and it is the civilized restraint of decorum that gives him the strength to do so, allowing him to balance rather than swoon. He remains detached even from his own responses to what he glimpses, and the poetry happens neither entirely in what he sees nor in his posture, but in the tension of the two:

La Cloche fêlée

II est amer et doux, pendant les nuits d'hiver,
D'écouter, près du feu qui palpite et qui fume,
Les souvenirs lointains lentement s'élever
Au bruit des carillons qui chantent dans la brume.

Bienheureuse la cloche au gosier vigoureux
Qui, malgré sa vieillesse, alerte et bien portante,
Jette fidèlement son cri religieux,
Ainsi qu'un vieux soldat qui veille sous la tente!

Moi, mon âme est fêlée, et lorsqu'en ses ennuis
Elle veut de ses chants peupler l'air froid des nuits,
II arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie

Semble le râle épais d'un blessé qu'on oublie
Au bord d'un lac de sang, sous un grand tas de morts
Et qui meurt, sans bouger, dans d'immenses efforts.

The Broken Clock

It is bitter and sweet, winter nights near where the fire pulses and smokes, to hear distant memories rise slowly in the sound of cantors singing through the fog.

Blessed the bell with sturdy throat which, alert and healthy no matter what age, flings faithfully its religious cry, like an old soldier wakeful in his tent.

As for me, my soul is cleft and when, in its ennui, it would people the cold night air with songs, often its weakened voice

seems the dull rattle of one wounded, forgotten on the rim of a lake of blood, under a great heap of dead men, dying, unable to move, in immense efforts.

This is not merely a record of what Baudelaire has seen; in the act of perceiving, and in the act of saying what he perceives, he allows the world to open itself further, and even his own inner brokenness to open itself further, to reveal a still deeper anguish within. Reveal to whom? These lines assume a public and assume a civilization, and by speaking this way, Baudelaire is not just looking at something for himself, seeing his state anew and alone; he is bringing into civilization, embodied by the poise and posture of the language, a spiritual understanding that he witnesses within his own experience, but that has validity beyond it.

                  Grant for a moment that English poetry does not have available to it this mode of declamation that can confront, standing tall, the terrible emptiness and beauty that it discerns within the surfaces and forms of what would often be discarded as refuse or corrupted matter. What loss is there to the political possibilities of English verse? It is not a loss of the ability to engage with politics certainly; it is instead a loss—though it no doubt comes with some gains—of a certain public voice associated not only with politics, but with something broader than politics. In other words, declamation is a public voice of poetry that far exceeds the political, but that is only possible when it emanates from a center of power. Declamation depends on a center that rises above a highly stratified, organized, and codified social system, over which it has control demonstrated by its mastery of its own arcane rituals, using them to mediate and stabilize itself. Declamation is not only good for poetry about power; it is good for poetry that would secure its own power, whatever the poetry is about. Baudelaire’s poetry does not happen to be about anything: it reaches out to the peripheries of the social world and experience, and even his recurrent invocations of odors and scents are intended to stretch the imagination (the olfactory is the most elusive sense to bring to mind). Thus extending its reach, the poetry affirms that the center reveals the significance of the periphery, and that the periphery reinvigorates the purposes of the center. Without a center there could be no declaiming—but also, without the art of declamation, the center could not exist in social imagination. It is the chief symptom that something distinct in the life of a language and culture has taken place: a center has arisen.

 When the social imagination orbits such a center (even if dissenting from it), one advantage at least is achieved: a belief that there exists some vantage point from which great distances can be perceived and united, a vantage that can harmonize even the most obscure and profane experiences. Hence Phèdre proves her own glory by looking upon her most discordant and taboo passions; that she can do so in the style that she does shows that she is firm in the center of herself. Hence Baudelaire proclaims the unity of modernity despite the incoherence of its surfaces. It is not bound together by his being able to stand at its center and see so far—it is not a proof that he alone possesses sufficiently extensive vision, not an act of ego—instead it depends on his submitting himself to the center, to his standing upon its ways of speaking, assuming the “glory” (as in the French “gloire”) that it affords. Baudelaire’s poetry is not testimony that he, this man, could see far—but that such a way of speaking could reach far, without requiring idiosyncratic bricolage of metaphor and diction, extending from the speaker to the gulf of the chasm where language, all language, must fail. He trusts in the etiquette of language to apprehend even those circumstances and experiences that etiquette of behavior and manners would condemn; the language has been sufficiently centered to represent and speak to any experience without his needing to break it forcefully.

                  Across the channel, Baudelaire’s contemporary Matthew Arnold pointed to the French Academy as a definitive authority and center, such as England lacked: “The less a literature has felt the influence of a supposed center of correct information, correct judgment, correct taste, the more we shall find in it this note of provinciality.”[vi] It is not a coincidence that it was founded in 1629 by Cardinal Richelieu, ten years before Racine was born. It is an aspect of the civilizing efforts of the French court. Arnold observed of the Academy: “To give the law, that one to literature, and that tone a high one, is its business. ‘Richelieu meant it,’ says M. Saint-Beuve, ‘to be a haut jury,’—a jury the most choice and authoritative that could be found on all important literary matters in question before the public.” When the first 1857 edition of Fleurs du Mal was censored for obscenity, Baudelaire may have wondered at whether the judge had understood the stringent poetic conventions he had followed. Arnold is concerned with the provincialism of English letters—but not all English letters: it is prose that suffers, whereas poetry is strengthened in his eyes by the provincial eccentricity of England and the English. Of English prose, he explains: “it may show many grave faults to which the want of a quick, flexible intelligence, and of the struct standard which such an intelligence tends to impose, makes it liable: it may be full of haphazard, crudeness, provincialism, eccentricity, violence, blundering.”  These, Arnold knows, are just what civilization, in its most intensely self-conscious expression, will prohibit from the stage of its rituals and ritual interactions. There is no room for improvising and there is no room on stage for violence in any undisguised form. For though the threat of violence is necessary to any social order, a display of violence is not the same as domination, power, discipline, or control. Set a Frenchman to write prose, he is, Arnold says “free, natural, and effective.” But in poetry, the Frenchman proves “limited, artificial, and impotent.” Baudelaire would be horrified, but not only horrified, for what Arnold calls “artificial” Baudelaire cherishes against the fallenness of nature—just as civilization is an artifice that orders the worst impulses of natural man. In “The Painter of Modern Life” he writes: “Anything beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation. Crime, a taste for which the human animal has drawn from his mother’s womb, is natural in origin. Virtue, on the contrary, is artificial, supernatural, since it has been necessary, in all times and in all nations, for gods and prophets to teach animalistic humanity what man, alone, could never have managed to discover. Evil comes about without effort, naturally, by fatality; the good is always the produce of art.” (trans. Keith Waldrop, “Translator’s Introduction,” xviii, Les Fleurs du Mal). By “good” here we need to understand something much broader than a bourgeois code of acceptable conduct; it extends to the good of his own verse, which depends upon the artifice of French letters to make good the imagining of the sordid, the corrupt, the ephemeral, and that which somehow both appalls and palls (the lifeless pleasures of the flesh that deepen ennui).

                  “La Squelette Laboreur” inspired one of the most interesting translations of Baudelaire, Seamus Heaney’s “The Digging Skeleton,” a poem, humbly and honestly, “after Baudelaire”[vii]:

I.

You find anatomical plates

Buried along these dusty quays

Among books yellowed like mummies

Slumbering in forgotten crates,

Drawings touched with an odd beauty

As if the illustrator had

Responded gravely to the sad

Mementoes of anatomy—

Mysterious candid studies

Of red slobland around the bones.

Like this one: flayed men and skeletons

Digging the earth like navvies.

II.

Sad gang of apparitions,

Your skinned muscles plaited like sedge

And your spines hooped towards the sunk edge

Of the spade, my patient ones,

Tell me, as you labour hard

To break this unrelenting soil,

What barns are there for you to fill?

What farmer dragged you from the boneyard?

Or are you the emblem of the truth,

Death’s lifers, hauled from the narrow cell

And stripped of night-shirt shrouds, to tell:

‘This is the reward of faith

In rest eternal. Even death

Lies. The voice deceives.

We do not fall like autumn leaves

To sleep in peace. Some traitor breath

Revives our clay, sends us abroad

And by the sweat of our stripped brows

We earn our deaths; our one repose

When the bleeding instep finds its spade.”

This is a superb poem. Baudelaire pulls Heaney’s language free of the grit that sometimes insists on itself, and Heaney’s mastery of the corporeal attunes us to how Baudelaire is first and foremost a poet of the senses, passing through them to the spirit beneath (which is itself often encountered as yet another physical reality). Among the boldest changes, he transposes what in Baudelaire is the query of what the laborers mean to suggest into a first-person statement. In Baudelaire, the second section of the poem reads:

De ce terrain que vous fouillez,
Manants résignés et funèbres
De tout l'effort de vos vertèbres,
Ou de vos muscles dépouillés,

Dites, quelle moisson étrange,
Forçats arrachés au charnier,
Tirez-vous, et de quel fermier
Avez-vous à remplir la grange?

Voulez-vous (d'un destin trop dur
Epouvantable et clair emblème!)
Montrer que dans la fosse même
Le sommeil promis n'est pas sûr;

Qu'envers nous le Néant est traître;
Que tout, même la Mort, nous ment,
Et que sempiternellement
Hélas! il nous faudra peut-être

Dans quelque pays inconnu
Ecorcher la terre revêche
Et pousser une lourde bêche
Sous notre pied sanglant et nu?

Other translators, of course, have preserved the framing of Baudelaire’s original. Here is Yvor Winters:

Out of the earth at which you spade,
Funereal laborers, tired and done,
Out of your straining naked bone,
Out of your muscles bare and frayed,

Tell me, what harvest do you win?
Slaves snatched from the charnel ground,
Who is the farmer drives this round
To fill his barn? And what your sin?

You, the terrible sign we're shown
Of our destiny's greater dearth,
Wish you to say that in the earth
The promised sleep is never known?

That the end has betrayed us here,
That even death himself has lied?
That though eternity betide,
Alas! we have again to fear

That in some unknown land we'll meet
A knotted earth that needs to be flayed —
To drive again the heavy spade
Beneath our bleeding naked feet?

The trouble starts where Heaney shifts to the first person, for it’s there that Winters convolutes: “You, the terrible sign we’re shown | Of our destiny’s greater dearth” and then “Wish you to say.” And it continues with the unfortunate “though eternity betide”  (the suggestion of tides of time is unfortunate; what it means for eternity to betide is unclear whether it means wait or happen, and that it might mean either does not help matters), and “a knotted earth that needs to be flayed” (the relation of “knotted” and “flayed” is hard to understand; though backs can have knots in them, they require massages and not flaying). Finally, it’s hard to work out what governs “to drive again the heavy spade”: is it that we’ll meet “to drive again” (but isn’t it that “we’ll meet | A knotted earth”?), or is that the knotted earth needs “to drive again the heavy spade”—but that doesn’t make sense since the earth does not drive the spade beneath the feet. Lest it seem that Winters is strangely inept, here is Roy Campell:

Mean you to show (O evil-starred
Exponents of too stark a doom)
The promised sleep may yet be barred,
Even from us, beyond the tomb;

That even extinction may turn traitor,
And Death itself, can be a lie;
And that perhaps, sooner or later,
Forever, when we come to die,

In some strange country, without wages,
On stubborn outcrops delving holes,
We'll push a shovel through the ages
Beneath our flayed and blinding soles?

There are a number of problems here also: the inversion of “Mean you to show,” and the unwanted meaning of “mean” (the opposite of “kind”); “even from us” that should be “even beyond the tomb” the unjustified evolutionary sense of “extinction”; the comma after “itself”; the interference of “lie” as deceive and “lie down”; the clotted temporal language from “perhaps” to “sooner or later” to “forever”; the suggestion of welcome and invitation in “come to die”; the irrelevant distraction of economic justice in “without wages”; the unclear syntax of “sudden outcrops delving holes” that makes it seem as if the outcrops are doing the delving; and “through the ages” that collapses the earth (“through the earth” is where they will push the shovels) and time, introducing abstraction where the everlasting horror of embodied life needs to be most acutely felt; and finally, the pun on “soles” that does the same thing, confusing body and soul in a poem that introduces the deeper terror that there is no soul beyond the sensations of bodily life, and the bizarre “blinding.”

Heaney avoids these failings because he does not attempt to reproduce Baudelaire’s elegant syntactical coordination in a language pruned and polished to reduce the uncontrolled eruptions of metaphors and ambiguities. But Heaney sacrifices something essential to Baudelaire: the reminder that it is the poet who speaks, speculating, imagining, querying the unknowable figures; he is actively drawing out what they might say, swirling deeper, with each phrase, into the nightmare that he has conjured. We can see, in the original, Baudelaire letting his language extend further and further into spiritual terror, without coming undone. Speaking for themselves, as in Heaney’s translation, the laborers can set out what they might represent, but Heaney cannot show the poet pursuing the thought. What is more, throughout the poem, Heaney—quite intentionally, and suitably given the collection, North—insists on touches of local, provincial dialect of English: “slobland” is the most obvious example, but “death’s lifers” plays with grim comedy on a colloquial expression (“lifers” in prison, or “lifers” in a school). Even “hooped towards” is a metaphorical flourish that Baudelaire’s French would not allow, and “plaited like sedge” has a local specificity, like Heaney’s speaker knows just where they are digging (as, in the context of the collection, he probably does). Though these touches are not true to Baudelaire, Heaney turns them to good effect in the contrast he establishes with the skeletons who speak with purgatorial clarity, assuming a universal vantage point on human affairs. But even then, they do not declaim; their first-person utterances, with the strength of simplicity, speak to the poet who encounters them on the plates—in Baudelaire, the poet interpreting what they mean speaks to all of existence, as Phèdre seems to.

                  “La Squelette Laboreur” is exemplar and exegesis of Baudelaire’s art. The imagination, whether reconciling one and many, being and non-being, or change and permanence, can also be approached as the faculty charged with mediating (and thereby preserving the distinction between) the inner and the outer, the physical and metaphysical, the conscious and unconscious. When art makes good on the imagination’s promise, it excels in this role; because a work of art is itself both a sensually accessible event or object in the world as well as a promise of significance to be disclosed to the viewer, it embodies in its own being and design the mediating function. Adopting the connoisseur’s approach to the surfaces and appearances of modernity—characterized by detritus, ephemera, and the fleeting, elusive thrill of sensual encounter—Baudelaire strolls the streets for the encounters that arrest him, and there allows something akin to reverie, or inspiration, move him to see into the surfaces of things. But what he sees there is what sets him apart: for what he finds there is another version of the outward flux, pointing to a still deeper chasm—The Infinite or Eternal—that remains beyond view, and beyond his language. He loses himself in an object of desire to find more desire; he discovers in the beauty of a Parisian dusk a further attestation of the senses. The closing lines of “La Beauté” cast a light on what for Baudelaire is both plight and glory:

                  Les poètes, devant mes grandes attitudes,

                  Que j’ai l’air d’emprunter aux plus fiers monuments,

                  Consumeront leur joiurs en d’austères études;

                  Car j’ai, pour fasciner ces docles amants.

                  De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles:

                  Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartés éternelles.

Poets, before my high postures seeming lifted from the proudest monuments, will spend their days in austere study

since, to fascinate such tractable lovers, I've pure mirrors to make everything more beautiful: these, my eyes, my eyes wide with eternal clarities!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The eyes of beauty reflect but reflect with an eternal brightness: in their depth, we can find but further surfaces, but the surfaces in their depth, or on their surface, are illuminated from the eternal—which reveals itself as a possibility, but only by indirection. Damnation in Baudelaire reveals itself the same way. Outer does not give way to inner, so much as outer gives way to another realm of the “outer” that suggests something more, something into which his language cannot pass. In “La Squelette Laboreur,” the anatomical plates, haphazardly found among the bookseller stalls on the banks of the Seine, reveal the body’s insides, which are themselves further flesh; depicted in action, these in turn attest to the thought that life will give way not to a realm without flesh, but to a fleshly existence illuminated by eternity, for eternity. Surface to a deeper surface that remains surface, but a surface that beyond the order of worldly time, seems a doom rather than promise. This is one aspect of the poem; the other is the aspect of the poem that comments on itself, that suggests that in approaching the poem, we are in a position similar to Baudelaire’s as he approaches the anatomical plates, that we look for the poem to lead us within itself and instead find only another version of itself.

                  All of this has bearing on declamation—for what Arnold thought to be “artificial” in declamation is a sense that it covers and converts the natural to something that obstructs it from view. Arnold takes the “natural” as the ground of authenticity. But Baudelaire does not only object to the natural as synonymous with evil, as in “The Painter of Modern Life,” but he also suggests that the ground of nature is either inaccessible to view or else is itself a fiction. What makes the anatomical plates speak is that they reveal the “nature” of anatomy in unnatural poses of art; the eternity they induce him to imagine is an extension of their artistry. Declamation, an achievement of a self-conscious civilization, establishes a polished surface of speech from which the depth of experience can be viewed, but in so doing brings the depths to its own plane: it removes them from obscurity and ambiguity, sets them out to view, like the plates on the bookseller’s stall. It does not deny that some experiences, feelings, or desires reside deeper within the psyche than others, but it assumes that all of them are capable of being polished, capable of being neatly flayed and set into a posed scene like the anatomical figures. When Baudelaire imagines what the anatomical figures might tell him, he purports to reveal what truth they hold within, but to do so, he invents a fiction, elaborating on possibilities that he imposes on them as much as he draws them from within. He is inspired by them to a vision of horror: a future without life of spirit freed from body. But he contains the horror: the inspiration fills his voice, which masters it within the decorum of its declamation. He does not yield, as in Heaney’s translation, to their words, and perhaps he could not; they could not speak without the artifice of his language. Nor could his words have the same effect if they were not always his own, even as he accommodates them within the civilized imperium of his language:

Qu'envers nous le Néant est traître;
Que tout, même la Mort, nous ment,
Et que sempiternellement
Hélas! il nous faudra peut-être

Dans quelque pays inconnu
Ecorcher la terre revêche
Et pousser une lourde bêche
Sous notre pied sanglant et nu?

“Nous” and “notre” are a first-person plural that encompasses all people, the “we” that he speaks before, as well as the skeleton laborers come to life in his fantasy. He does not only paraphrase or interpret the figures. Instead, in his speech he expresses his own trepidation towards that which he suspects they reveal. “Hélas! il nous faudra peut-être” arches from the fatalist despair of “hélas” to the momentary doubt of “peut-être.” Those two words represent the two limits of what Baudelaire’s language can accommodate, and both are calculated, even artificial. “Hélas” has no life apart from the conventions of poetry; it signals its own art. It points to an intensity of feeling that it is not for the poem to explore directly. “Peut-être” is a momentary, calibrated wobbling of Baudelaire’s mastery over his material, his uncertainty as to whether he interprets aright, whether he believes what he says. It is a fissure into the yearning and fearing that he elsewhere sublimates into his account of the figures. Neither is a complex semantic entity, but they testify to Baudelaire’s commitment to remaining standing on the smooth surface of articulate exposition.

                  Arnold observes that the cultivated standards of the French language exclude “violence.” It could be objected that Baudelaire, here with his image of a “pied sanglant et nu” does the same. But though the image is violent, Baudelaire’s language is not, and an implicit claim of his poetry  is that his civilized language and public mode of address can remain unbroken and adequately meet most perverse desires and unseemly subject matters without doing violence to itself. Even violent subjects do not provoke his violence towards his medium. Here is “Une Charogne”:

Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
Ce beau matin d'été si doux:
Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme
Sur un lit semé de cailloux,

Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique,
Brûlante et suant les poisons,
Ouvrait d'une façon nonchalante et cynique
Son ventre plein d'exhalaisons.

Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
Comme afin de la cuire à point,
Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature
Tout ce qu'ensemble elle avait joint;

Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe
Comme une fleur s'épanouir.
La puanteur était si forte, que sur l'herbe
Vous crûtes vous évanouir.

Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride,
D'où sortaient de noirs bataillons
De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
Le long de ces vivants haillons.

Tout cela descendait, montait comme une vague
Ou s'élançait en pétillant;
On eût dit que le corps, enflé d'un souffle vague,
Vivait en se multipliant.

Et ce monde rendait une étrange musique,
Comme l'eau courante et le vent,
Ou le grain qu'un vanneur d'un mouvement rythmique
Agite et tourne dans son van.

Les formes s'effaçaient et n'étaient plus qu'un rêve,
Une ébauche lente à venir
Sur la toile oubliée, et que l'artiste achève
Seulement par le souvenir.

Derrière les rochers une chienne inquiète
Nous regardait d'un oeil fâché,
Epiant le moment de reprendre au squelette
Le morceau qu'elle avait lâché.

— Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure,
À cette horrible infection,
Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
Vous, mon ange et ma passion!

Oui! telle vous serez, ô la reine des grâces,
Apres les derniers sacrements,
Quand vous irez, sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses,
Moisir parmi les ossements.

Alors, ô ma beauté! dites à la vermine
Qui vous mangera de baisers,
Que j'ai gardé la forme et l'essence divine
De mes amours décomposés!

Carrion

Recall, my soul, the thing we saw that fine mild summer morning: there at a bend in the path, loathsome carrion on a bed sown with cobbles,

legs in the air, like a lewd woman, scorching and sweating poisons, reeking belly split open nonchalantly, cynically.

The sun beat down on that rotten meat, as if to be sure it was well done, and to render unto Mother Nature a hundredfold all she had joined together.

And the sky watched that superb carcass blossom like a flower, the stench so strong you thought you might fall in a faint on the grass.

Flies buzzed around the putrid belly, whence black armies of larvae came gushing like a viscous liquid along those tatters of life.

All of it came down and reared again, like a wave, or bubbled up; it seemed the body, inflated with vague breath, lived and multiplied.

And the world gave out a strange music, as from wind and running water, or like the rhythm of grain as the winnower turns and shakes it in his fan.

Those shapes faded and were no more than a dream, a rough sketch slow to appear on forgotten canvas, which the artist can only complete by memory.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Behind some rocks, an anxious bitch dog eyed us angrily, waiting for the moment she could get back to those bones for the mouthful left.

—And to think, you will be like that filth, like that horrible stench: you, my eyes' guiding star, sun of my life, you my angel, my passion!

Yes! such you will become, O queen of graces, after the last sacrament when, under the grass and the gross flowering, you mold with the other bones.

Then, O my beauty! tell the worms that feed on you with kisses, that I have kept both the form and the divine essence of my loves-in-decay!

It would be easy to feel a frisson of irony between the subject matter and the style here, not least in the sexual suggestiveness of the earliest stanzas describing the carcasses splayed legs. The effect is probably intended and achieved in the fourth stanza (“Et le ciel regardait”), but the next two stanzas pull away from that easy, obvious contrast, and present sustained grotesque descriptions, and the irony is different: that in decay, the corpse seems alive. Life and death are felt as codependent, even indistinguishable, not with the irony of pastoral framing putrescent, but as a consequence of honest accounting of what is seen. Characteristically of Baudelaire, he does not look beyond or into the flesh of the corpse, but instead he lets a world come into focus upon it; one surface yields an infinitude of further surfaces, like a single wave that is shown to be composed of countless more (“Et ce monde rendait…”). In its decaying state, the body seems like a fading dream, like a work of art composed by memory on a forgotten canvas (Baudelaire perhaps is the artist, as he remembers the scene). The carcass is degrees removed from reality, but the suggestion is both that the natural image is the fullest work of art and also that nature is revealed as art only in its corruption. Then the rhapsody breaks: a dog watches, waiting to reclaim the chunk of meat it has torn from the skeleton. It is a dog-eat-carcass world; or is the dog doing on its own terms what Baudelaire has done on his? “Et pourtant”—“and yet”: what does this turn against? The entire poem up to this point? The stanza about the dog? Despite all of what he has said, she—his beloved, his soul—will be like this carcass, decaying. The “and yet” turns against all she assumes about what she is, or all he assumes about what she is: calling her “my soul” in the first line was not merely a term of endearment, but a symptom of the belief that she is not liable to the decay of flesh. Perhaps the sight of the dog recalls him to the truth: the bestial foraging, the animal life, to which she and he are subject. This memento mori might, for another poet, have been the final turn of the imaginative screw, but for Baudelaire, there is one more still. The final stanza turns in another direction, albeit it is without a declaration of a reversal (there is no “and yet” opening it). He implores his love to tell the worms that will devour her with their kisses that he has preserved her divine essence, as he does with all of his lovers. This follows nothing in the poem thus far, which has been captivated by the flesh, asserting nothing directly about the poet’s powers and referring only once, in the first line’s “mon âme,” to a soul. The final stanza strikes me as an answer to a question that the poem implicitly raises: how is it that Baudelaire can so calmly sustain his fascination with the decay of the flesh, how is it that he can see it as he does, and retain his detached calm? The final lines suggest an answer: possessing in himself the divine essence of his loves, he has a reservoir of strength to admit their outward passing. At the same time, the final stanza is where the intensity of declamation is greatest, having risen in volume from the turn of “Et pourtant.” There is no ironic disjunction here. The language extends over the scene, over the audience, from the center of Baudelaire’s power, which announces its source and legitimacy in his transcendent grasp of the inner essence of living creatures. That inner essence is beyond his poetry and can only be gestured at. To do more, perhaps, would be to do violence either to its form or to language. It is one of the mysteries of faith that cannot be spoken. At the same time, his confident hold on it, within himself, moves behind the language, enabling it to master the scene of fleshly decay from the permanent center it provides. Baudelaire has transposed the center-periphery structure of courtly life to a center-periphery structure of the imagination, where the center is a permanent spiritual insight and the periphery is the material world, the language not penetrating the mystery of mysteries that lies at the center but moving over the world from it.

                  Baudelaire’s “Spleen” poems are most well known in English and have invited the most varied and creative translations. This is because they are masterpieces but also because they mutter, grumble, and grit their teeth. Yet they are also perfect examples of declamation as Baudelaire re-invents it, for they assume a dignified posture even as they cannot rise above the defeat of the spirit, and they do this without bathos or irony. We might be tempted to view it as a posture assumed in defiance of the world—except it celebrates its own emptiness. The failure of the spirit is glorified, the sin of acedia the occasion of declamation, not made larger by it, since the poems refuse grandeur and return to the vacant triviality and small irritations of the quotidian. But because Baudelaire declaims the failure and the sin, and declaims from the experience of them, they are placed at a center of his world, made able to encompass all of it. The spirit is not redeemed but, by the strength it possesses in its negation of itself, it is affirmed in its being—even failing, the spirit is present, able to sustain itself as a seat of civilized power. The contrast we should make is with Hopkins’ terrible sonnets, where the fragmentation of the verse, and Hopkins’ sense of himself wasted unpublished at the provincial fringes of Britain, stand in sharp contrast to dandified metropolitan assurance of Baudelaire’s emptiness. Here is “Spleen (IV)”:

                  Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle

                  Sur l’esprit gémissant en proie aux long ennuis,

                  Et que de l’horizon embrassant tout le cercle

                  Il nous verse un jour noir plus triste que les nuits;

                  Quand la terre est changée en un cachot humide,

                  Où l’Espérance, comme une chauve-souris,

                  S’en va battant les murs de son aile timide

                  Et se cogant la tête à des plafonds pourris;

                  Quand la pluie étalant ses immense traînées

                  D’une vaste prisone imite les barreaux,

                  Et qu’en people muet d’infâmes araignées

                  Vient tendre ses filets au fond de nos cerveaux,

                  Des cloches tout à coup sautent avec furie

                  Et lancent vers le ciel un affreux hurlement,

                  Ainsi que des esprits errants et sans patrie

                  Qui se mettent à geindre opiniâtrement.

                  —Et de longs corbillards, sans tambours ni musique,

                  Défilent lentement dans mon âme; l’Espoir,

                  Vaincu, pleure, et l’Anguoisse atroce, despotique,

                  Sur mon crane incline plante son drapeau noir.

When the sky, low and heavy, weighs like a lid on the groaning spirit, prey to long ennui; when from the full encircling horizon it sheds on us a dark day, sadder than our nights;

when earth is changed into a damp cell, where Hope, like a bat, beats timid wings against the walls and bumps its head against a rotten ceiling;

when the rain's immense spouts imitate prison bars and a mute population of vile spiders constructs webs at the base of our brains,

bells burst out suddenly in fury and hurl skyward a frightful howl, like homeless wandering spirits raising a stubborn whine.

—And long hearses, without drum, without music, file off slowly within my soul. Hope, conquered, weeps, and atrocious Anguish, despot, upon my bowed head plants his black flag.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

There are two anticlimaxes in the poem. First, there is the delayed completion of the sentence in the fourth stanza: “when…when…when.” The anticlimax owes not to the delay but to how the stanza itself rounds out after building: “geindre opiniâtrement,” or as Waldrop has it, “stubborn whine.” Declamation does not whine—and Baudelaire does not whine here, but that phrase allows that the poem comes close to a whine, and it punctures the steadily aggrandizing image of bursting bellows and wandering spirits with an irksome expression of a petty feeling. Then there is a second anticlimax, after the full-stop, the final stanza carrying on the vision, with what was airborne and in flight returning to earth: silent hearses progressing. Between the second and third lines of this stanza we find the only turbulent enjambment of the poem, “Espoir | Vaincu, pleure” breaking a noun and an adjective, as happens nowhere else. The adjectives crowd in the third line, “atroce, despotique” fumbling for a word as he succumbs to Anguish. The final line is sure of itself, but in being sure of itself, it is only sure of its defeat; it is driven through with the steel of honesty, too proud to deny its truth.

                  It is a peculiar consequence of a civilized declamation that it makes possible a sort of honesty that is more akin to sincerity than to authenticity. Sincerity looks outward, to others; it suggests that one can be transparent about one’s inner state, even if one is mistaken about what one believes. The notion of authenticity makes little sense when we read Baudelaire: he is not, like Wordsworth or Hopkins, a poet who cares about the truth of his self. He cares about himself in so far as he contains a soul that is eternal, abstracted from the particular contingencies of life, even if felt through them. For the same reason, we cannot speak easily about Wordsworth or Hopkins in terms of sincerity since their poetry takes place from a position of isolation and, even when in conversation with others, is not in conversation with, or consciously in front of, a public audience that would care more about sincerity than authenticity. If, as is at least possibly the case, sincerity is less personal and less idiosyncratic than authenticity; and if declamation gains in sincerity what it loses in authenticity, sustained by a civilization that trains individuals for the honesty of meaning what they say, rather than saying always who they are; if all of this is accepted, then we can look at contemporary American politics to fully gauge why Baudelaire is as imaginatively distant as he is. Sincerity is the antithesis to what is sought when people ask for politicians to be “real.” It depends on some shared norms of communication that allow for one person to judge the meaning of another by clear and common standards, and something like a centric civilization lies behind such norms (and though it does not need to be conservative or exclusionary along lines of historical patterns, it would need to exclude something and someone). The word civilization has been emptied of meaning in the United States, rejected by progressives, appropriated in warped and impoverished form by right-wing influencers. What if it were redefined as a structure of social exchange that permitted strangers to judge the sincerity of other strangers, combined with a social imaginary that included the possibility of communication set before others, not for them or to them, but open to their judgment? I can only leave that as a question, but it suggests that, for instance, if there were to be such a thing as “Western Civilization” (which there is probably not), then its health would depend on its capacity to sustain judgments of sincerity among diverse inhabitants within and beyond its borders; sincerity begets trust in exchanges, trust in translations, and the possibility of compromise among differences. It does not abolish hypocrisy, but holding sincerity as a value makes people especially attuned to it as threat and resource (Baudelaire knew this well, in his most famous line, “hypocrite lecteur,— mon semblable, —mon frère.”) It points to civilization as a society of diplomats, since a code of sincerity, rather than eliminating indirectness and falsehood, allows people to recognize that even in being indirect, in speaking through what Lauren Pernot calls “subtext,” a real message may be sent, under the assumption that the interlocutors share an understanding of what must be said only through circumlocution or other misdirection. “Diplomatic” is a curious word for Baudelaire’s poetry, but his sincerity, his refusal to “bullshit,” makes his declamation ring true, even if it does disclose an authentic self.[viii] Sincerity sustains his civilized language, and his civilized language sustains his sincerity, and both allow him to mediate between the center of society and the peripheries, the dandy and the delinquent, the transitory and the permanent, and the sacred and the profane. Without being democratic, his poetry is inclusive; without being egalitarian, it is magnanimous in its reach; without being sympathetic, it is generous in its attention. It exemplifies a political imagination that, however alien to the United States, has something to say to us.