An Atmospherics of the city : Baudelaire and the poetics of noise

"What happens to poetic beauty when history turns the poet from one who contemplates natural beauty and the sublime to one who attempts to reconcile the practice of art with the hustle and noise of the city? An Atmospherics of the City traces Charles Baudelaire's evolution from a writer who practices a form of fetishizing aesthetics in which poetry works to beautify the ordinary to one who perceives background noise and disorder-the city's version of a transcendent atmosphere-as evidence of the malign work of a transcendent god of time, history, and ultimate destruction. Analyzing this shift, particularly as evidenced in Tableaux parisiens and Le Spleen de Paris, Ross Chambers shows how Baudelaire's disenchantment with the politics of his day and the coincident rise of overpopulation, poverty, and Haussmann's modernization of Paris influenced the poet's work to conceive a poetry of allegory, one with the power to alert and disalienate its otherwise inattentive reader whose senses have long been dulled by the din of his environment. Providing a completely new and original understanding of both Baudelaire's ethics and his aesthetics, Chambers reveals how the shift from themes of the supernatural in Baudelaire to ones of alienation allowed a new way for him to articulate and for his fellow Parisians to comprehend the rapidly changing conditions of the city and, in the process, to invent a "modern beauty" from the realm of suffering and the abject as they embodied forms of urban experience"-- Provided by publisher An Atmospherics of the City traces Baudelaire’s evolution from an aesthetics of fetishizing, in which the function of poetry is to produce beauty out of the ordinary by means of the poet’s artifice, to a poetics of allegory that reads the modern city’s atmospherics as a product of urban noise and as a function, therefore, of what today would be recognized as entropy. In this later stage, the function of the poetic becomes one of disalienation; it strives to awaken readers to the presence of Evil as a malevolent force that is responsible for the depredations of human history over time. This evolution, in which poetic practice is redefined for the modern age as one of bearing witness to that which is most alien to (and destructive of) the poetic, is traced through readings of verse poems drawn principally from the “Tableaux Parisiens” section of the Fleurs du Mal (in that volume’s second edition of 1861), and of prose poems from the posthumously published Le Spleen de Paris , defined here as a poet’s “urban diary” and understood as a manifestation of temporality in its very absence of structure. Motifs such as the pane of glass and the statue are traced as their significance evolves from a very early poem (“Je n’ai pas oublié”) through later poems in both verse and prose