Poetics en passant: Redefining the Relationship between Victorian and Modern Poetry (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

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POET ICS E N PA S S A N T

10.1057/9780230101258 - Poetics en passant, Anne Jamison

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who captured and expressed what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they inherited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film, and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels, reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters incomparable in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the character of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy, Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of experience as editor of books on nineteenth century literature and culture. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes editions, essays, and reviews in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory.

PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison

FORTHCOMING TITLES: Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print, by Alberto Gabriele Romanticism and the Object, Edited by Larry H. Peer From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab Royal Romances, by Kristin Samuelian The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson



Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull

E N PA S S A N T

R E DE F I N I NG T H E R E L AT IONSH I P BET W E E N VIC TOR I A N A N D MODE R N POET RY

Anne Jamison



POET ICS

POETICS EN PASSANT

Copyright © Anne Jamison, 2009. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61899–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jamison, Anne Elizabeth, 1969– Poetics en passant : redefining the relationship between Victorian and modern poetry / Anne Jamison. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–61899–2 (alk. paper) 1. Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 1830–1894—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 1830–1894—Technique. 3. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867—Technique. 5. Poetics—History— 19th century. 6. Poetry, Modern—19th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PR5238.J36 2009 821⬘.8—dc22

2009006231

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.



To my wonderful family and also C. H. P.



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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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1 Any Where Out of This Verse: Baudelaire’s Prose Poetics and the Aesthetics of Transgression

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2 “Prose Combat”: Baudelaire and The Press

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3 The “Victorian Baudelaire”

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4 Passing Strange: Christina Rossetti’s Unusual Dead

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5 Goblin Metrics

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6 “When I am dead, my dearest . . .”: Modernism Remembers and Forgets Rossetti

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Coda

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Notes

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General Index

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Index to Individual Works

259



C ON T E N TS




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n earlier version of chapter 1, “Any Where Out of this Verse: Baudelaire’s Prose Poetics and the Aesthetics of Transgression,” appeared in NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH STUDIES 29.3 and 4 (spring/summer 2001) and is reprinted with permission of the University of Nebraska Press. A version of chapter 4, “Passing Strange: Christina Rossetti’s Unusual Dead,” appeared in Textual Practice 20.2 (2006). Material from chapter 3 appeared, in very different form, in Browning Society Notes 29 (2009) as part of conference proceedings from “La Prude Angleterre: Victorians and France, Cultural Cross-Currents in the Nineteenth Century,” organized by University College, London, and the Browning Society. Many thanks to Berry Chevasco for organizing such a productive conference. A brief review essay on material discussed in chapter 6, “When I am dead my dearest . . . : Modernism Remembers and Forgets Rossetti” appeared with the same title as an “alert” in How2 2.1 (2003). All translations are my own except where otherwise noted. I gratefully acknowledge the support of teachers and colleagues at Princeton University, especially that of Claudia Brodsky, Stanley Corngold, and Michael Wood. Suzanne Nash, U. C. Knopflmacher, and Elaine Showalter provided invaluable early advice and help, as did long conversations about poetry with Evgeni Pavlov, Dan Blanton, Soelve Curdts, and Amy Billone, whose friendship and extraordinary sensitivity to poetry often sustained me. April Alliston was more instrumental than she knows, and Oliver Arnold, Eileen Reeves, and Cornel West all provided inspiration at key moments. I would also like to acknowledge research and travel support from the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of English, and the Graduate School, without which my work at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris would not have been possible. I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues at the University of Utah, especially Disa Gambera, Paisley Rekdal, Maeera Schreiber, Tom Stillinger, and Barry Weller for their careful reading and many wonderful conversations about poetry; Barry has worked hard enough to deserve a second salary. At a crucial juncture, Tom also performed



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a superhuman act of editorial valor and has been the most stalwart source of human support. The careful attention of Vincent Pecora greatly helped to improve the manuscript in its later stages. Howard Horowitz provided important blues. I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Vincent Cheng and Stuart Culver. Yopie Prins and James Richardson deserve special thanks for inspiring and supporting “Goblin Metrics,” I will never be able to thank Graham Robb enough for Le Coupeur. Francesca Simkin was also extremely helpful with cobbling things together and tailoring the results. I am grateful that the staff at the BN were able to find ways to allow me to work on materials that the computer system felt should not occupy the same place at the same time. Brigitte Shull, Lee Norton, and the editorial staff at Palgrave MacMillan have been generous and helpful in overseeing manuscript through to book. Benton and Phyllis Jamison provided love, a houseful of books, a seemingly endless education, and everything else I ever needed. Valerie Tamplin also helped make poetry a real presence in my early and later life. Craig Dworkin has been a wonderful partner and interlocutor about all things poetic, avant-garde, and, more recently, toddlery. Miles Justice Jamison Dworkin was very patient and understanding when the last stages of the manuscript’s gestation and birth closely coincided with his own. My wonderful daughter, Juliana Nicole Penham, is a constant source of joy and inspiration, and I need to thank all the other Penhams too. Last but not least, I would like to thank Jim Provencher and Cary Plotkin, teachers who first taught me how to read and write about poetry.



x

Qu’est-ce que les périls de la forêt et de la prairie auprès des chocs et des conflits quotidiens de la civilisation? —Charles Baudelaire I cannot tell you what it was But this I know: it came to pass. —Christina Rossetti

W

riting in a special issue of the journal Victorian Poetry, Ivan Kreilkamp calls for a reevaluation of “the relation of Victorian poetry to modernity,” thus adding his voice to a growing chorus of critics questioning the exclusion of Victorian poetry from discussions of nineteenth-century modernism.1 Yet the title of the special issue— Whither Victorian Poetry?—itself embodies the kind of obstacle any such project quickly runs into, for in no one’s imagination, I would like to suggest, do “modern” people go around saying “whither,” while “Victorians” might easily be envisioned saying it every other word. When Walter Benjamin defines modernity in terms of Baudelairean “shock,” however, the fleeting, unexpected encounters in arcades and crowded boulevards he envisions are grounded explicitly in historical, mid-nineteenth-century phenomena. The central figure of the flâneur, for example, rises to prominence in tandem with architectural innovation, first in arcades, and then with the coming of the grands boulevards: “Before Haussmann, wide pavements were rare; the narrow ones afforded little protection. Flânerie could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades.”2 Some of these phenomena are specific to Paris, but there is much in Benjamin’s nineteenth century that is not—gas lamps, for example: “The appearance of the street as an intérieur in which the phantasmagoria of the flâneur is concentrated is hard to separate from the gas lighting. The first gas lamps burned in the arcades.”3 The discussion of gas lamps closes with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “plaint about [their] disappearance” and incorporates not only Poe’s Marie Roget but the image



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of Charles Dickens in Lausanne, at work on Dombey and Son and yearning for the street-sounds of London, or again, pensive at Lake Geneva, nostalgic for gaslit Genoa.4 Thus “Baudelaire’s” nineteenthcentury urban modernity is at once local and cosmopolitan, defined by an international literature that spans the Atlantic and most certainly does not stop at the Channel. Benjamin is hardly alone in seeing Baudelaire’s poetic version of these phenomena as exemplary; critics from T. S. Eliot to Paul de Man to Fredric Jameson have each defined a very different version of modernity, even postmodernity, in the image of this mid-nineteenthcentury poet and his cosmopolitan existence.5 No prominent critic has seen any such role for a Victorian poet. Kreilkamp raises the “Baudelaire question” explicitly: “To put the point baldly, why do we have no English Charles Baudelaire, no mid-nineteenth-century poet whose work participates, explicitly and consciously, in the early theorization of modernity occurring at the time in France and Germany and America?” Kreilkamp further wonders whether “this lack is at least in part a byproduct of the questions we ask of Victorian poetry,” a question to which my short answer is “yes, but,” and my long answer is this book. My caveats are as follows: while we certainly need to ask different questions of Victorian poetry, a real reevaluation requires that we ask some new questions of modern poetry as well. Such a project entails troubling Baudelaire’s unchallenged position in defining the poetic modern’s early contours as well as reevaluating his relationship and that of modern poetry more broadly to the era largely understood to precede it. I would further like to recall that Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelairean “shock” encompassed not only the “shocks and conflicts” of urban street life, but the incorporation of such shock into a poetics; Benjamin suggests, for example, André Gide’s sense of “intermittences between image and idea, word and thing” as “the real site of Baudelaire’s poetic excitation” and cites Jacques Rivière’s analysis of the “subterranean shocks by which Baudelaire’s poetry is shaken; it is as though they caused words to collapse.”6 In evaluating poetic modernity, then, we should look not only to sites represented, but to verbal and formal effects, “sites of . . . poetic excitation.” With these caveats in mind, in place of the question “why have we no English Baudelaire?” I pose the following: suppose that a transgressive, innovative strain in poetry does emerge in England nearly simultaneously with Baudelaire and his poetics of shock. Why has no one noticed? I’d like to begin with some dates and terms. Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) began their poetic



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careers in the 1840s and published the poems on which their reputations largely rest in the 1850s and 1860s. Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems was first published in 1862; the title poem is dated 1857, the date of Baudelaire’s first edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Nonetheless, to compare Rossetti and Baudelaire is to compare “Victorian” and “modern,” since that is how they have been categorized. This terminology suggests a temporal and conceptual difference that effaces the historical fact that the two are near-exact contemporaries. Indeed, both poets were celebrated by the next generation’s most radical and subversive British poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, who not only pioneered Baudelaire’s reception in England but also reportedly screamed in ecstasy on receipt of a new volume of Rossetti’s and wrote poems in honor of each.7 Yet today, if Charles Baudelaire is the green-haired poster boy of the poetic modern, the iconic poète maudit embraced by British and Continental modernists alike, Rossetti is the very image of the Victorian spinster poetess the same British modernists set out to overcome. The two exist across a gulf that is in a sense coextensive with the English Channel but in practice is more divisive, a gulf that includes and confuses gender and national difference with history and chronology. This gap can be attributed in part to the label “Victorian,” which acts with a powerful divisive force, isolating British literature in a kind of insular environment belied by the realities of nineteenthcentury international travel, translation, and empire. The Oxford English Dictionary itself defines “Victorian” first in relation to Queen Victoria’s reign and next as “resembling or typified by the attitudes supposedly characteristic of the Victorian era; prudish, strict; oldfashioned, out-dated.” For “modern,” on the other hand, the OED gives “being in existence at this time; current, present” and “not oldfashioned, antiquated, or obsolete.” To be modern is thus by definition not to be “old-fashioned” or its synonym, “Victorian”; “modern” is “now,” while “Victorian” never was. If the “modern” in art and literature is, as Baudelaire argues, the “representation of the present,” then “Victorian” art is out of the running to begin with. “The representation of the present,” furthermore, in Baudelaire’s paradoxical formulation, insists on a strangely dehistoricized relationship with a nonetheless vibrantly historical and “time-stamped” present. Indeed, Paul de Man takes this paradox as a “case in point” for a purely “literary mode of being,” a “form of language that knows itself to be mere repetition, mere fiction and allegory, forever unable to participate in the spontaneity of action or modernity.”8 Thus, one influential version of “literary modernity” seems to abstract Baudelaire and his



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writings out of messy nineteenth-century materiality altogether. The adjective “Victorian,” on the other hand, precludes any such abstraction, stamping all the nouns it modifies not just with a time but with an expiration date. This “expired-by” stamp also specifies a country of origin. Asked to respond to a question on the transnational raised by the journal Victorian Studies, Sharon Marcus remarks that “any comparative question is a daring one for Victorian Studies to ask” since the journal—like the broad, interdisciplinary field it represents—“defines itself in terms specific to history and politics.” 9 Furthermore, as Marcus also argues, although this field has been transformed by a surge of interest in the transnational relationships of empire and colonization, British culture’s translinguistic relationships with relatively equal European nations have received comparatively little attention. This lack of “European transnationalism” in the face of “global” English studies underscores a sense of absolute division between Continental and British culture that actually undermines the very priorities—historical accuracy and cultural particularity—the field has set for itself, since it is defined by an era during which crossChannel interest and travel were common.10 Yet even on syntactic grounds, the label “Victorian” poses particular obstacles to crosscultural analysis. While comparisons between British and Continental “Enlightenments,” “Romanticisms,” or “Modernisms” flow easily, cross-cultural comparisons of mid-nineteenth-century literatures seem to demand constructions like “Victorian French” (nonsensical) or “British Victorian and French post-Romantic” (clunky), while the admirably simple “nineteenth-century” Marcus advocates elides the vast and dominant field—Victorian Studies—with which critical work about British authors of the period must engage. “Victorian” may have a lot to answer for, but we still need to answer to it. The paucity of comparative work on nineteenth-century poetics, however, can hardly be explained fully through shortcomings in the field (or field name) of Victorian Studies. When Habermas argues that “the spirit and discipline of aesthetic modernity assumed clear contours in the work of Baudelaire,” he joins ranks with other twentiethcentury theorists in defining modernity in Baudelaire’s image and on his terms. According to Habermas—whom Kreilkamp evokes as setting the terms in which he would like to see Victorian poetry newly considered—Baudelaire’s defining “contours” have meant that “the avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future. The avant-garde must find a direction



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in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured.”11 Rhetorically, then, modernity “invades,” “exposes,” “shocks,” and “conquers.” None of these verbs describes behaviors open to or acceptable from a Victorian “lady”; hence the critical rhetoric of modernity seems to exclude any potential contributions from such a source. It is safe to say that the “clear contours” “aesthetic modernity assumed” for Habermas through Baudelaire’s work are not remotely “womanly”—except, ironically, that they are: Baudelaire famously figures the modern as the difference between a “rustic matron” and a fashionable, well-dressed and made-up courtesan. In neither case is she a middle-class spinster, however, nor is she the representor as opposed to the represented. In the work of Baudelaire, the modern is male-authored, although the female body is often what is written. Of course, the gendering of modernity as male no longer “shocks” or “exposes” anything we didn’t already know; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have defined Pound, Eliot, and Stevens as masculinist “tastemakers” who ensconced the values of formal difficulty, impersonality, and hermeticism as both modern and male—as opposed to characteristics such as sentimentality and expression that are at once coded feminine and Victorian.12 Wayne Koestenbaum showed us how Ezra Pound equated the new, the intellectual, and the phallic, posing men as the “masters of the new upjut” and connecting the act of giving form to “externalizing” ejaculation while likening the “phallus ‘charging head-on’ into ‘female chaos’ to the frustration of ‘driving a new idea into the great passive vulva of London.’ ”13 Such genderconscious challenges suggest modernists created Victorian poetry as the feminine other that enables modern poetry to define itself as masculine—as well as being the old-fashioned that allowed modern poetry to be new.14 While it is undeniable that twentieth-century British modernism defined itself in opposition to its own “old-fashioned” (and feminized) Victorian other, this is emphatically not true of the nineteenth-century modern Baudelaire himself. He wanted Tennyson and Browning to know his work; he admired the Pre-Raphaelite painters; he was significantly engaged by the work of Thomas Hood—although this influence figures less than prominently in the voluminous critical literature about him. For Baudelaire, who struggled to break free of the considerable hold classicism still maintained on French prosody, his contemporaries in England and America represented the new and even the exotic. They represented a different way of thinking about poetry, one he both translated and transposed, a part of the “unknown territory” his work explored. Thus an important aspect of



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my argument about Baudelaire is that his transformations are effected explicitly transnationally—at the level of image, theory, and practice. As is well known, Poe was his greatest influence of any background, but his obsession introduced him to other English-language poets and writers. Christina Rossetti, however, was not among Baudelaire’s enthusiasms, and he is every bit as misogynist, particularly with relation to woman writers, as the least rehabilitated version of Eliot or Pound. So, if Rossetti, not only a Victorian but also a woman writer, was attracted by values such as formal difficulty, linguistic materiality, impersonality, and experimentation, the prominent male modernists with whom she shared these values were particularly unlikely to recognize them from such a source.15 But why would such works require scrutiny to reveal their emergent modern values? If Rossetti had these interests, why did she not state them? Why not, like her French contemporary, openly espouse them, theorize them, and thematize them in her work? In answer to these questions, I argue that a Victorian woman writer’s positive, explicit relation to these values would place her in a transgressive position vis-à-vis a literary culture that saw women’s writing as inherently derivative and naturally expressive, a highly gendered literary culture in which she would nonetheless need to publish. Her mode of transgression, then, would need to be sneakier. I’d like to follow up with a few more dates and facts: A second edition of Goblin Market appeared in 1865 with some new poems added; a second edition of Fleurs du mal appeared in 1861, with thirty-five new poems added but, significantly, with six poems, which were judged obscene and banned by the courts, removed. These banned poems included Baudelaire’s representations of female same-sex desire in “Les Lesbiennes” and “Les Femmes damnées”; Rossetti’s poem that arguably addresses similar subject matter not only was not withdrawn from subsequent editions of her work, it went on to be celebrated for generations as a children’s book. The reception of these two important poets has long been subject to such differences. It was Rossetti’s text, however, that was illustrated for Playboy Magazine.16 Poetics en passant, then, offers a new understanding of midnineteenth-century “cross-Channel” poetics in England and France. I argue that far more than the national and linguistic boundaries that separated the two cultures at the time, the subsequent labeling of one as “Victorian” and the other as “Modern” has obscured significant aesthetic and political aspects of the poetries of each. Thus critical blind spots produced by prejudices about gender, nationality, and historical period have resulted in literary taxonomies that present



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a distorted, disconnected view of an era in poetics whose real crossChannel connections, distinctions, and symmetries should command our attention. Through a sustained analysis of innovative works by Baudelaire and Rossetti, I have found surprising analogues and parallels in the way these poets respond poetically and theoretically to their own poetic and cultural contexts: I find in them a shared impulse toward the simultaneous subversion, violation, and conservation of tradition that ultimately leads both to what I call a poetics of transgression. Because of each poet’s distinct cultural position— that is, because one is a woman writing from within the tradition of Victorian poetry in Victorian England and the other is a man writing French poetry during the same era—they arrive at this poetics for different reasons, and their approaches and attitudes to such a poetics are also necessarily very different. I name these different approaches to poetic transgression “shock”—Baudelaire’s own terminology, popularized by Benjamin—and “stealth”—a word that reflects the sense of sneakiness that I and other readers of Rossetti have experienced in her work, and which I understand as transgression’s mode when it has good reason to go unnoticed. If we agree to view Rossetti in this light, we can see that the nineteenth century yields two provocative and influential models of poetic transgression. The first is akin to physical, bodily penetration, and often figured as such: sexual violation, bodily violation; put bluntly, fucks and cuts. The second suggests surveillance, near-encounters, exchange without penetration, tangential connections. Shock cannot pass without notice—it pains, startles, arrests, while stealth allows for more surreptitious movement, for challenges to pass unnoticed and change to come about undisturbed. Unsurprisingly, given its nature, “shock” is the more recognized mode. It is the mode of Pound’s “Hell Cantos” with their “condom full of black beetles” and “tattoo of lady golfers dancing on anuses,” of Surrealism, of Bataille’s “Story of the Eye.” It is by no means the exclusive territory of men, authorizing in its wake work like Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School or even, reaching further back, Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus or Michael Field’s arresting line, “Your rose is dead.”17 The introduction of “stealth,” however, opens the discussion of literary transgression to those who would (and in some cases, did) suffer social and material consequences if they “shocked”—but who at the same time might have more pressing, material reasons for challenging or subverting the poetic status quo. I focus on the case of the reputation-dependent unmarried Victorian woman poet, but analogous consequences would apply to a range of nonwhite, non-male, or nonheterosexual



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literary experimenters. Rossettean “stealth,” I would argue, finds analogues in Wilde’s “Bunbury,” whose punning anal naughtiness continues to escape family dinner-theater patrons of The Importance of Being Earnest, or in W.E.B. Dubois’ epigraphical pairing of lines from Tennyson and Goethe with lines from the sorrow songs in The Souls of Black Folk, a paratextual effect that might read as aspiring or conciliatory but also functions between the lines to mount a direct challenge to European cultural superiority. “Stealth” also operates in the follow-up to the Michael Field line I associated with “shock”: “Your rose is dead/The grand Mogul,” the second line deflecting and parrying the blow to tradition and decorum dealt by the opener by providing a distinct floral variety and thus a glancing literal rather than bluntly figurative gardening context.18 Importantly, this expanded understanding of nineteenth-century literary transgression also extends the discussion beyond the boundaries of Baudelaire’s homeland. Even setting aside Benjamin’s architecturally-and historically grounded Baudelairean “shock,” literary transgression is most associated with French theory, particularly with the work of Georges Bataille, with whose name it was long nearly synonymous—and this association is particularly close when it comes to poetics.19 When Roland Barthes contends, for example, that “the transgression of values, which is the declared principle of eroticism, has its counterpart—perhaps even its foundation—in a technical transgression of the forms of language,” he comes to this conclusion through a discussion of Bataille’s work.20 Susan Suleiman, arguing that Bataille was “not the first in our century to valorize an aesthetics of transgression,” traces this linkage back to the Surrealists via a familiar lineage of Sade and Lautréamont but sees Barthes as the first to develop a theory of the “metaphoric equivalence between the violation of sexual taboos and the violation of discursive norms.”21 In this estimation, literary transgression is at once historically limited (identified as the theoretical invention of the twentieth century) and dehistoricized, as Barthes seems to suggest a necessary link between linguistic and sexual transgression. However, a distinct although related eighteenth-century transgressive tradition in France—from Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets to Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses— produced texts that shock at the level of representation but often conform to near classical norms of stylistic economy and operate in the confines of an already established epistolary form (particularly true of Laclos, and at times, even of Sade). Similarly, in the British Romantic tradition, a text such as Byron’s Don Juan records any number of racy exploits, and its author itself is the very icon of any number of social



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and sexual transgressions, but the poetry makes few inroads into new formal or linguistic territories. Indeed, Baudelaire’s project in Les Fleurs du mal sets up an analogous tension between traditional form and lexical, representational and thematic innovation, and thus can be seen to continue in this “either/or” transgressive tradition. Only in Spleen de Paris does he consistently bring about a simultaneous violation of social, thematic, lexical, and formal codes. And yet in his wake, transgressive form and transgressive sexuality have become so strongly associated as to seem necessarily related, at least to theorists like Barthes and Bataille. I depart from this version of literary transgression in a number of distinct ways. First, I am concerned with literary transgression as praxis and theory in its nineteenth-century manifestations—with transgression “before Bataille,” so to speak. Second, I do not see the connection between literary and sexual transgression as necessary and inherent but rather as historically particular and contingent. Furthermore, I agree (on one point, at least) with Stallybrass and White that “it would be wrong to associate the exhilarating sense of freedom that transgression affords with any necessary or automatic political progressiveness,” nor, again with them, do I see it as necessarily “intrinsically conservative”—although I part company with them in their apparent conclusion that it is necessarily aligned with “the struggle for bourgeois hegemony.”22 And, last but not least, I do not limit my consideration of a nineteenth-century transgressive modern poetics to texts authored by French men. I understand Rossetti’s first collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, to include two modes of poetic transgression that directly parallel Baudelaire’s work in Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris. In her death poetry, I see an analogous move to skew the relationship between a stealthily trangressive semantic content and a coldly impersonal formal perfection—a relationship the poems themselves present allegorically. In the title poem Goblin Market, however, the form itself performs the multiple transgressions the poem thematizes, exploring the link between poetic and physical embodiment. (I restrict my discussion of Rossetti almost exclusively to this collection, her first, because it provides for near-exact historical contemporaneity with Baudelaire, although Rossetti long outlives him, and also because I find her poetic career turns in a different direction after this book). As a whole—with reference to both writers, but not exclusively to them—I understand “shock” and “stealth” as modern phenomena but identify this version of modernity with postclassical and post-Romantic developments of the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, this transgressive poetics emerges specifically in



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reaction to elements of a classicism that views art as defined by adherence to rules and norms and a version of Romanticism that associates poetry with an upheaval and disruption (emotional or intellectual) within the self. The poetics I am concerned with marks a departure from both these traditions but retains something of the structure of each. Like classicism, it relies on norms and rules and, like the Kantian aesthetic, on the necessary supposition of a consensus about taste. Its relation to these rules and consensus is one of subversion or violation, rendering it the antithesis of classicism. Like Romanticism, this poetics foregrounds disruption, but it is of a less ontological, more socially mediated variety than is typically associated with a Byronic hero to whom different rules—or simply, no rules—apply. Its disruptions are contingent and presented as such: based on materials, interpretations, social norms, this poetics is neither above the law nor in flagrant violation of it. So much for the abstraction that identifies the genre of the introduction. Finding that the best antidote to inherited prejudices and critical blind spots is sustained reading, Poetics en passant considers both poets on their own home turf but also reestablishes their proximity, taking the cue from the simple lesson to be learned from dates and geography. I have undertaken sustained critical analysis of some of the most innovative texts of each poet—Rossetti’s quiet “songs” and “female corpse” poems as well as her overtly violent “Goblin Market”; Baudelaire’s perfect sonnet on Beauty as well as his most violent prose poetry—in juxtaposition with other poetic, critical, and journalistic writings from the period: nineteenth-century metrical treatises for the lady in question, and hatmaking journals for the gentleman. In broad terms, I argue that the rigidity of French neoclassicist prosody corresponds to the strictness of Victorian social forms, while the relative anarchy of English prosody is matched by the social and physical freedom of the Parisian flâneur. The kind of departures, distinctions, and reciprocal rapprochements I have in mind, however, are better illustrated by the tandem consideration of two paradigmatic texts.

THE B A D G L A ZIER The prose poem “Le Mauvais Vitrier” presents an iconic scene of Baudelairean shock as the poetic persona invites the street vendor inside only to throw him downstairs in a cacophony of broken glass. The text is also paradigmatic of the way Baudelaire invokes, valorizes, and ironizes poetic tradition, including his own œuvre and praxis, his



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Il y a des natures purement contemplatives et tout à fait impropres à l’action, qui cependant, sous une impulsion mystérieuse et inconnue, agissent quelquefois avec une rapidité dont elles se seraient crues ellesmêmes incapables. Tel qui, craignant de trouver chez son concierge une nouvelle chagrinante, rôde lâchement une heure devant sa porte sans oser rentrer, tel qui garde quinze jours une lettre sans décacheter, ou ne se résigne qu’au bout de six mois à opérer une démarche nécessaire depuis un an, se sent quelquefois brusquement précipités vers l’action par une force irrésistible, comme la flèche d’un arc.23 There exist certain natures, purely contemplative and entirely unfit for action, who nonetheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, are moved to act with a rapidity of which they would not have believed themselves capable. One, fearful of hearing distressing news from his concierge, cravenly prowls outside his door for an hour without daring to enter; another keeps a letter for two weeks without opening it, or resigns himself only after six months to completing a task that has been necessary for a year; from time to time they feel suddenly impelled to action by an irresistable force, like an arrow from a bow.

The text not only narrates but embodies with parodic exaggeration the prose/poem interruptive drama that defines its genre. The prosaic tone—detached, marked by a series of long dependent clauses, laced with prosy indicators (“cependant”; “quelquefois”)—extends long enough to firmly establish expectations of its continuance. And indeed, the text continues in good essay form. As it establishes our formal and tonal expectations, it lays out general parameters of a behavioral problem and moves to consider the consternation such behavior occasions in observers who wish to understand the problem from within specific belief systems: Le moraliste et le médecin, qui prétendent tout savoir, ne peuvent pas expliquer d’où vient si subitement une si folle énergie à ces âmes paresseuses et voluptueuses, et comment, incapables d’accomplir les choses les plus simples et les plus nécessaires, elles trouvent à une certaine minute un courage de luxe pour exécuter les actes les plus absurdes et souvent même les plus dangereux.24 The moralist and the doctor who believe they know everything cannot explain the source of this mad energy that comes so quickly to these



international influences, and his local, material context to create the signature violent drama of the prose poem:

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The prose is long-winded, qualified, and hypotactic to excess, itself suggestive of a writing “incapable d’accomplir les choses les plus simples.” The text gives us our first key “frisson,” however, when its apparently cool, analytic writer tells us that he has been victim more than once to such “crises . . . qui nous autorisent à croire que des Démons malicieux se glissent en nous et nous font accomplir, à notre insu, leurs plus absurdes volontés” (“crises . . . that justify our belief that malicious Demons slither into us and force us to carry out their most absurd whims unawares”). Suddenly, from a world of cafés and ticket takers, physicians and physiognomies described in a clogged and academic prose, the possibility of demonic possession looms large, the shift in register at “Démons” marked out formally by the capital letter. The following paragraph shifts back into the mundane—“un matin je m’étais levé maussade” (“one morning I woke up in bad spirits”)—and ends with an ordinary enough gesture, the opening of a window, a “simple thing” that has at last been accomplished. The narration of this literal action is also linguistically performative, however: the verbal gesture also opens the window on a different frame of reference and register: “j’ouvris la fenêtre, hélas!” (“I opened the window, alas!”). Baudelaire self-referentially indicates the infiltration of the poetic, citing with “hélas” the signature verbal gesture of his œuvre.25 The following parenthetical draws our attention to the poetic process, the parentheses themselves suggesting the otherworldliness often assigned to matters of poetic composition: (Observez, je vous prie, que l’esprit de mystification qui chez quelques personnes, n’est pas le résultat d’un travail ou d’une combinaison, mais d’une inspiration fortuite, participe beaucoup, ne fût-ce que par l’ardeur du désir, de cette humeur, hystérique selon les médecins, satanique selon ceux qui pensent un peu mieux que les médecins, qui nous pousse sans résistance vers une foule d’actions dangereuses ou inconvenantes.)26 (I beg of you to note that the spirit of mystification which, for some, is not the result of work or schemes but rather of a fortuitous inspiration, has much in common, even just on the grounds of the intensity of desire, with that humor called hysterical by doctors—satanic by those who think a little better than doctors—that pushes us irresistibly toward a multitude of dangerous and improper acts.)



indolent, sensuous souls, nor how, although incapable of accomplishing the simplest, most necessary things, they find at a given moment an excess of courage to perform the most absurd and often even the most dangerous actions.

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The term “mystification” comments through “the dynamic of contexture” on the register indicated by “satanique,” “inspiration,” and “Démons,” all of which associate the sudden, motiveless action with supernatural, otherworldly and occult processes. The text, furthermore, seems to confirm this judgment. On the other hand, “mystification” also names the process by which “travail” and “combinaison”—which together arguably make up poetic praxis—are obscured, and precisely by such occulting rhetoric. The prose poem thus undermines a variety of clichés about the actions (poems) of “dreamy, contemplative natures” (poets), here ironized as the products of hysteria or demonic possession, with the difference between the two likewise collapsed to one of rhetorical field and register. This tension between materiality and inspiration—demonic or otherwise—insinuates itself into the poem in other ways as well, insidiously enough by enjoining the reader to “fill in the blank” and supply the unspoken ideal, of which the poor glazier’s merely useful wares are in violation. Readers must imagine the implied line of poetry that might speak of beautifying existence by replacing the world’s clear glass with colored panes and thus become complicit in the mystifications attendant on the old model of “dreamy, contemplative” poetry that denies or occults its materiality, its “travail” and, ultimately, its physical manifestation on paper. This unrealized metaphor of the glass, however, also aligns this unwritten (and therefore entirely ideal) poetry with cliché: in one way, the text clearly emerges as an elaboration on the nostalgic, inauthentic desire to “voir tout en rose.” The image of the glass serves both as metaphor (for poetry) and literalization (of the cliché), the prose poem taking both and rendering them heavy, violent, prosaic in a twisted instance of a Jakobsonian metamorphosis. The glazier who happened to stumble into the wrong poem at the wrong time is pushed down the stairs by the mad poet screaming aesthetic doctrine (“La vie en beau! La vie en beau!”), who then finishes the job with a flowerpot as the glazier crushes his burden of glass under the weight of his own wares. Baudelaire’s text seems to advocate a traditional sense of the aesthetic purpose of poetry, to “make life beautiful,” but the effect the text creates is jarring; it jettisons the very ideals it seems to espouse while exposing and embracing the violence it suggests aestheticization entails. Street enters poem; poem wins. Yet the street—in the person of the glazier—is not the only foreigner that enters the poem. The text’s overall structure, its rhetorical paths and preoccupations, are, if not directly translated, then very directly transposed from Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse.”27 Baudelaire not only violates and rejects a canonical,



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formally classical (and French) poetics, he replaces it by an AngloAmerican prose tradition that he has stolen, imported, and weirdly identified as “poetry.”

A similarly iconic scene in Rossetti’s work can be found in the posthumously published novella Maude. Rossetti withheld the text, and it does not match the Baudelaire text in maturity, as she wrote it at eighteen. The first scenes establish patterns of tension and conflict that continue to mark her work for years to come, however, and constitute the closest thing to a prose statement of her poetics that her entire oeuvre affords. The novella begins in a domestic, exclusively female world, and opens with a reiterated request for expression and communication: “A penny for your thoughts,” said Mrs. Foster one bright July morning as she entered the sitting room with a bunch of roses in her hand, and an open letter: “A penny for your thoughts,” said she addressing her daughter, who, surrounded by a chaos of stationery, was slipping out of sight some scrawled paper. This observation remaining unanswered, the Mother, only too accustomed to inattention, continued: “Here is a note from your Aunt Letty; she wants us to go and pass a few days with them. You know Tuesday is Mary’s birthday, so they mean to have some young people and cannot dispense with your company.” “Do you think of going?” said Maude at last, having locked her writing-book.28

The scene of writerly solitude interrupted also figures prominently in Baudelaire’s prose works, and if the “Bad Glazier” is summoned to intervene, the angry landlord of “La Chambre double” or the noisy mistress of “La Soupe et les nuages” abruptly breaks in to disturb poetic reveries.29 In these Baudelairean texts, however, we begin in the contemplative mind of the poet; and, if the orientation seems initially unclear in the “Le Mauvais vitrier,” we soon move to the characteristic scene of solitary poet/speaker gazing through the window to the world outside. In Maude, however, we begin closest to the mother’s perspective, sharing her question and equally experiencing the reticence of her daughter. Our first impression of the eponymous heroine is one of furtive silence; our first introduction to her writing is “scrawled paper” “slipping out of sight”: the material conditions of writing, its physical form and scene, are foregrounded and paired with writing’s apparent determination not to reveal even its presence,



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much less anything it might express. This gesture, furthermore, comes in response to the repeated requests for communicative sharing with which the entire novella begins: writing thus transpires with the expectation of expression and explicitly under its sign, but positions itself transgressively against this expectation. It not only refuses to reveal its own secrets but is itself the occasion for reticence, disrupting the spoken communicative response “penny for your thoughts” all but demands. The normative status of the demand, furthermore, is underscored by the clichéd status of the set phrase, a status at once emphasized and undermined by its immediate repetition. This repetition causes us to revisit the phrase, suggesting a more literal understanding of the market in “thoughts” into which writers enter when they sell their wares. And, although we are soon told that Maude does not write “for the public eye,” the future writer of “Goblin Market” is unlikely to emphasize the idea of a verbal market to no purpose. If Maude does not wish to enter the exchange of thoughts for pennies, however, neither does she enter into other traditional modes of female writing. The mother also bluntly defines these female roles as she holds a bouquet of roses in one hand and an “open” letter in the other, both metonyms for different relations women have to writing. Women are written as roses, metaphorically, and themselves write “bouquets” and “garlands of verses.” They communicate “openly” through letters, which are largely devoted to the arrangement of social requirements as well as themselves formally constituting these requirements: the bulk of Rossetti’s voluminous correspondence is filled with invitations accepted, but more often declined, excuses made, congratulations, and especially condolences offered, but it includes very little about the poetry for which she is known. Maude’s writing is immediately identified as different and distinct from these conventional modes: their introduction to the scene of writing as well as the attendant request for communication closes off this other, more secretive writing, and Maude will speak only when her writingbook has been “locked.” Like Baudelaire’s, then, this text’s first order of business entails establishing the norms it will transgress. The description of Maude’s writing-book serves a similar function; it is not “a Common-Place Book, Album, Scrap-Book nor Diary, but a compound of all these”; it hides its tracks not only by dissembling, but by resembling feminine forms while combining and reconfiguring them, producing something new that can nonetheless “pass” unnoticed.30 Traditional feminine forms and the forms of social communication and convention are at odds with the writing-book; each interrupts and interferes in the



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other. Even familial, filial “sharing” seems at odds with a writing project that is importuned by demands that the author reveal thoughts or feelings. Writing is immediately represented as a furtive act, one that interrupts or precludes communication but hides its doing so, its very hiddenness compounding its transgressive quality as well as covering its tracks. The rest of the conversation, we are told, consists of “vain questions, put to one who without telling lies was determined not to tell the truth.” These vignettes establish quite different scenes of writing. The male writer presents a figure alone in a room but in physical contact with a street life that at once encroaches on the poet’s vision and is violated by it. The female writer, by contrast, appears in a bourgeois social setting, surrounded by family and other social and household duties, in contact with the outside world only by virtue of a letter that brings an invitation to go out—to another drawing room, an invitation that works more like a command performance: “they cannot do without you.” This world may encroach on the writing, but the writing slips under the social forms of communication represented by the stationery it hides beneath. These two scenes depict writers concerned with the relation of writing to a social and material world from which a “pure poetics” (a terminology associated with both writers) would have writing divorced. They also display a keen interest, however, in the relationship of writing to writing, as praxis, art and tradition, key questions if we are to reevaluate our understanding of a modernism that defines itself at least in part in terms of its turn toward writerly form and its break from tradition. Rossetti’s text showcases no penetrative intrusion along the lines of “street enters poem,” “English penetrates French,” or even “prose enters poem”; the novella integrates poetry in a book of prose fiction, but the genres remain distinct and resemble a tradition familiar to novels with female protagonists, who often penned verses. The novella does accomplish on the formal level what it represents and describes, however. It is itself “a compound” of extant forms and modes of women’s writing that can hide itself as one of them. These transgressive modes of innovation prove central to the project of each poet—the simultaneous reinvigoration and destruction of French poetic tradition by foreign imports and incursions, in the case of Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris, and the non-expressive, collagelike “compounding” of metrical and vocalic material that Rossetti will practice in the poem “Goblin Market.” Both rely heavily on the premise and practice of linguistic duplicity, however, on the ability of language to define norms and expectations and simultaneously—or



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often in quick succession, on second glance—to undermine them. Both models also propose modes of reading transgressively and encode “straight” reading practices as foils to accentuate or occult their own transgressive potential. The intricacies of such commonalities and distinctions play out in the ensuing chapters as follows. Like its title, the structure of Poetics en passant is based on an interlinguistic pun. Baudelaire’s signature poem “A une passante” represents two figures who do not quite meet, who are separated by convention, gender, and anonymity but united by a passing coincidence of proximity, modernity, and a moment of shared insight, or consciousness, or power struggle. The woman, of course, does not speak; ironically, she might maintain a similar reticence in Rossetti’s verse: Rossetti writes, “I cannot tell you what it was/ But this I know, it came to pass.” The fleeting cohabitation in shared moments of proximity without contact or direct knowledge is also a structure common to both writers, and one I draw on to structure my analysis of their work. The book’s two main sections on Baudelaire and Rossetti present parallel chapters, each tracing these important analogues and distinctions through sustained textual and culturally specific analysis. In the chapters “Anywhere out of this verse” and “Passing Strange,” I examine the ways both poets distance traditional forms from their expected affective content, as seen in poems from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems. Where Baudelaire moves to perform a self-violating aesthetics of shock and interpenetration in his work in three genres, Rossetti uses the familiar trope of the dead woman to “pass” among the critical, poetic, and social norms of her era, undermining them and thus enacting an alternative poetics of stealth, reticence, and duplicity. In the chapters “Prose Combat” and “Goblin Metrics,” I show how violent poems like Baudelaire’s “Bad Glazier” and Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (Rossetti’s experiment with somewhat more overt shock) interrupt the conditioned responses produced by canonical poetics with commercial and popular modes of discourse. Far from “pure” formal exercises, these interruptions evoke the economic, social, and political valences of textual materials and techniques, trading on the historically specific nuances evident in period writings on phonetics and meter (Rossetti) and trade publications like tailoring and bootmaking journals (Baudelaire). Rather than being understood to yield similar forms, the “shock” mode of each poet should be understood to resemble the other as follows: textual interpenetration embodies and enacts the violent sexual, physical, and social interpenetrations of



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the narrative level through an exploitation of class-charged and (even more powerfully for Rossetti) gender-charged formal and lexical material. The final chapters in each section, “The Victorian Baudelaire” and “How Modernism Remembers and Forgets Rossetti,” reveal each poet’s intimate connection to the period that critical convention has mistakenly identified only with the other. Throughout these sections, Poetics en passant reevaluates the way categories such as “form,” “purity,” “impersonality,” and “transgression” have been coded in terms of gender, poetics, nation, and historical period. Christina Rossetti’s “stealth” now clearly provides an important complement to the more familiar “shock” model advanced by Baudelaire. Viewed in this light, Rossetti appears to take a vanguard position in developing the very kind of experimental, impersonal poetics long critiqued for its misogynist exclusion of women. Traditionally understood as the champion of poésie pure, Baudelaire here emerges as the practitioner of a radical, violently hybridizing poetics, heavily reliant on techniques and strategies derived from English and American poetry and the popular press. By means of this “double vision,” the book as a whole presents a new vision of nineteenth-century poetics that exceeds current categories of the “Victorian” or “Modern”: cross-Channel, gender-balanced, formally innovative, socially canny, and materially engaged.



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A N Y W H E R E O U T O F TH I S V E R S E : B AU D E L A I R E ’ S P R O S E P O E T I C S A N D T H E A E S T H E T I C S O F TR A N S G R E S S I O N1

Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit. Celui-ci voudrait souffrir en face du poêle, et celui-là croit qu’il guérirait à côté de la fenêtre. Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme. Life is a hospital in which each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. One would like to suffer by the stove, another believes he would get well by the window. It always seems to me that I would be well anywhere but where I am, and this question of moving is one I discuss ceaselessly with my soul. —Charles Baudelaire “Any Where Out of the World”2

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harles Baudelaire not only wished to be where he was not—he often made the journey. He insisted repeatedly on his right to contradict himself, and he availed himself of it with alarming frequency. Most famously, Les Fleurs du mal records his creative travels between opposing poles he styles “Spleen” and “Idéal”: between the modern and classical, the temporal and eternal, the venal and immaculate muse.3 In the Petits Poèmes en prose, Baudelaire retraces and revises again, often seeming to decimate the work of the verse, to flatten the



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metaphoric heights the verse attains in its approach to either polar absolute, as Barbara Johnson has convincingly argued.4 Following the lead suggested by key verse-prose doublets such as “La Chevelure” (“The Head of Hair”) and “Un Hemisphère dans une chevelure” (“A Hemisphere in a Head of Hair”), critical literature on the prose poem has tended to focus on this journey from verse to prose, emphasizing the increased ironic, often violent perspective of the prose work. Such readings cast “Spleen de Paris” as an ultimate turn toward “Spleen” that abandons the transcendent potential of “l’Idéal” and produces a text characterized above all by a “perpetual clash of sentimental and moral anarchy,” by “fragmentation, discontinuity,” and “external and internal chaos.”5 Johnson ultimately saw the prose poem as a stylistic and theoretical development on the verse, the “second revolution” of Baudelaire’s poetics. Her focus on the verse-prose doublets, however, supports her position but perhaps skews the textual evidence in her favor. The dating of Baudelaire’s individual texts is notoriously unclear, and abundant evidence suggests that Baudelaire continued to alternate between the two forms throughout the late 1850s and early 1860s, pointing to a more heterogeneous and reciprocal compositional practice—a frequent changing of beds.6 The question of genre is never far from discussions of the prose poems, even as they have come close to eclipsing the verse in critical discussions over the past several decades. As “the only genre with an oxymoron for a name,” the prose poem interrogates the very notion of genre even before the reader has passed over the “threshold” from paratextual generic title to particular text.7 The irony implicit in the generic title underscores the kind of polar duality that Baudelaire everywhere inscribed into his writings. Tzvetan Todorov identifies “three different forms or figures the exploration of duality takes on” in the prose poems. The first, “implausibility”: “a single phenomenon is described, but it is so out of tune with ordinary habits that we cannot keep from contrasting it with ‘normal’ phenomena or events” (“Mademoiselle Bistouri”; “Assommons les pauvres”); next, “ambivalence,” in which “[t]wo opposing terms are both present here, but they characterize one and the same object” (“La Corde”; “La Chambre double”; “Le Mauvais vitrier”); and finally, what Todorov singles out as the most common: “antithesis, the juxtaposition of two beings, phenomena, actions, or reactions that are endowed with contradictory qualities” in which we might place the organizing poles not only of this collection (poetry and prose) but the “Spleen” and “Idéal” of Les Fleurs du mal as well.8 This structural and generic emphasis on duality, compounded by the presence of the doublets and everywhere



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underscored by Baudelaire’s overt obsession with the double, naturally focuses critical attention on relations between the two genres of poetry Baudelaire wrote: the verse for which he is best known gets paired with the other genre that proclaims itself as poetry. The introduction of a third term significantly complicates interrelations among the Baudelairean genres: the critical prose writings. The aesthetic and critical writings themselves are heterogeneous, to say the least—switching positions not only from essay to essay, but sometimes from page to page. This quality makes it hard to talk about a unified Baudelairean aesthetics. Expectations for logical continuity of aesthetic outlook are far higher in general for a body of expository or critical writing than for a collection of poems: a poet would hardly be faulted for emphasizing one or another aspect of beauty in different individual poems—as in “La Beauté” versus “Hymne à la Beauté,” for example. Such contradictions within Baudelaire’s poetic oeuvre were traditionally understood less as disrupting than emphasizing poetry’s unifying and transcendent potential, as variations of tone within a harmonious whole.9 The same diversity of opinion among different critical essays, however, is more likely to be viewed as mere theoretical inconsistency, particularly when each opinion is voiced so polemically. Ironic duality is one matter, self-contradiction at the theoretical level is another. These critical writings bear a complex, even seemingly vexed relationship to Baudelaire’s poetry—at times complementary, at times remarkably antithetical. In his critical writings, for example, he can maintain rigid aesthetic distinctions and divisions—such as those between the functions, methods, and aims of the various arts and genres—that seem at odds with the synaesthetic ambitions of his poetic project. Furthermore, his stated positions on poetics per se are often more conservative than his positions with regard to other art forms—perhaps another case of simply wanting to lie in the bed where he is not. But is this constant switching really just a case of the sheets always being whiter on the other side? Not likely—the sheets on one side are always stained, betray the trace of time, money, the stale residue of a sexuality tainted by these things. Is it only restlessness? Ennui? Why does Baudelaire sometimes prefer these stains, and at others dream of banishing them for all time—in fact, along with all time? Like all his writings, the critical work displays various aspects of Baudelaire’s struggle between the ideal of the “beauté pur” and the increasingly valorized beauty of temporality, between the desire to worship and the desire for violation—the two beds that, in the prose poem “La Chambre double” (“The Double Room”), appear as one bed with



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a set of linens which change aspect dramatically depending on the temporal and aesthetic orientation of the viewer. Baudelaire’s aesthetic writings are always thus linked with his poetics and with our reading of his poetry, but not always plainly on the theoretical level. The interplay of rhetoric, imagery, and even methodology, however, reveals a far more integrated relationship than has often been supposed.10 As I will argue, self-contradiction for Baudelaire is not mere inconsistency, but a creative mode born of an ongoing conflict in Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory and poetic practice. The prose poem emerges from a productive tension between Baudelaire’s verse and critical prose writings, and in these prose poems, theory and practice, verse and prose, critical and poetic modes of writing alternately violate, encroach upon, or embody each other, acting out a process I call an aesthetics of transgression.

“L’E X POSITION UNI V ERSELLE DE 1855” A ND A ESTHETICS OF TR A NSGRESSION

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L’étude du beau est un duel où l’artiste crie de frayeur avant d’être vaincu. —Baudelaire

In his “Exposition Universelle de 1855,” Baudelaire gives his most radical presentation of an aesthetics that not only allows but valorizes transgression—not only of accepted norms established by academic convention, but of a more wide-ranging and elemental scope. It is not a position he will maintain with consistency throughout the remainder of his career. As late as 1859 he writes, in direct contradiction to this 1855 stance, that “les rhétoriques et les prosodies ne sont pas des tyrannies inventés arbitrairement, mais une collection de règles réclamés par l’organisation même de l’être spirituel”11 (“rhetorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrannies, but a collection of rules required by the very organization of spiritual existence”). What Baudelaire presents in 1855 is far from such a position. What exactly he does present is not immediately obvious; he approaches from a variety of different angles. Baudelaire clears up one point right from the start: he is not excited by the traditional position: Tout le monde conçoit sans peine que, si les hommes chargés d’exprimer le beau se conformaient aux règles des professeurs-jurés de la terre, puisque tous les types, toutes les idées, toutes les sensations



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Everyone readily understands that if the men charged with the definition of beauty were to conform to the rules of the professors and jurors of the world, then all types, all ideas, all sensations would dissolve into a vast unity, monotonous and impersonal, as immense as boredom and nothingness.

This passage, if taken on its own, would not necessarily contradict his later (and earlier) position that compositional rules correspond to occulted spiritual rules—the rules, the right rules, do that. The rules of the “professeurs-jurés” might just be, in that case, the wrong rules. But even this position (more moderate than what immediately follows, and rendered more radical by it) flies in the face of the then still prevalent classicist aesthetics. Comparatively few of Baudelaire’s contemporaries were ready to accept that conformity with aesthetic rules and norms was anything but necessary, much less detrimental, to the expression of beauty. It is difficult to overstate the tenacity of the grip in which classical precepts—translated into neoclassical academic standards and norms—held the French art world. In poetry, neoclassical prosody held sway despite Romantic era innovations in vocabulary and subject matter—even Baudelaire, whose verse poems were banned for their transgressive, violent, sacrilegious subject matter, could not or did not substantially break away from alexandrines until he broke away from verse. Similarly, in painting, a neoclassical revival that was centered around the schools of David and Ingres continued to thrive, having weathered the insurgency of Romanticism earlier in the century. The idea that rules had to be followed may have been questioned by some, but certainly not by “tout le monde”—this is a rhetorical feint, presenting an idea at least strongly controversial if not revolutionary as a fait accompli. Furthermore, Romanticism’s challenge was mounted on the strength of different premises and couched in different terms.13 Victor Hugo’s preface to Les Orientales, for example, is profoundly revolutionary in its own right in its insistence on total freedom of content for artistic production. Hugo’s rhetoric is directly confrontational, taking the form of a dialogue between revolutionary poet and establishment critic. The critic questions why the book was even written, since the poet himself must recognize that the very premise is “horrible, grotesque, absurde,” that “le sujet chevauche hors des limites de l’art.” From the classicist perspective, such limits are rational and universally agreed upon: to overstep them is to place oneself



se confondraient dans une vaste unité, monotone et impersonnelle, immense comme l’ennui et le néant.12

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and one’s work at odds with artistic success, since the result of such a breach can be neither “joli” (pretty) nor “gracieux” (gracious)— both desired effects for art. He exhorts the poet to treat “des sujets qui nous plaisent et nous agréent” (“agreeable and pleasing subjects”) and disparages the “étranges caprices” (“strange caprices”) favored by the poet. Hugo’s poet (not surprisingly) defends the freedoms he has taken, but in terms that differ greatly from any employed by Baudelaire: À quoi il a toujours fermement répondu: que ces caprices étaient ses caprices; qu’il ne savait pas en quoi étaient faites les limites de l’art; que de géographie précise du monde intellectuel, il n’en connaissait point, qu’il n’avait point encore vu de cartes routières de l’art, avec les frontières du possible et de l’impossible tracés en rouge et en bleu; qu’enfin il avait fait cela, parce qu’il avait fait cela.14 To which he has always responded with firmness: that these caprices were his caprices, that he didn’t know what would constitute the limits of art; that he knew no precise geography of the intellectual world, that he had never yet seen any roadmaps for art, with the boundaries of the possible and impossible outlined in red and blue; and that in a word, he had done what he had done because he had done it.

The poet is half revolutionary, half Napoleonic. The maps and boundary lines of art no more exist for such as him than the map of Europe seemed to exist for France, for a time. To say that his poems have crossed the limits of art is not a valid criticism because no map of these limits exists. He has not broken any rules because there are no rules to break. This is not a poetics of chaos or anarchy, however. This is a poetics of the Poet, who will do what he likes because there is nothing to stop him—a proto-Nietzschean poet. Hugo’s position also recalls Kant’s theory of artistic Genius: “Genius is the talent . . . that gives the rule to art” or “the innate mental predisposition . . . through which nature gives the rule to art,” and this rule “cannot be couched in a formula and serve as a precept” but rather “must be abstracted from what the artist has done.”15 For Hugo also, the poem is not formless but derives its structure from the internal structure of the poet, not from an extant set of rules. Denying the validity or even the existence of an external limit or a rule, however, is far from locating beauty’s very existence in the crossing of a limit or the breaking of a rule. Baudelaire builds just such an argument in the 1855 essay, forging necessary associations between the concepts of rules, shock, newness, and beauty: “Tant il est vrai



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qu’il y a dans les productions multiples de l’art quelque chose de toujours nouveau qui échappera éternellement à la règle et aux analyses de l’école!” (So it is true that in the manifold productions of art, there is something that is always new, that will forever escape academic rules and analyses.)16 Rules and norms retain a prominent, necessary role in constituting aesthetic experience. For Baudelaire, “les limites de l’art” and the relationship the work of art bears to them are of no less importance than for the classicist: the stakes are high, equally high for Baudelaire as for a confirmed classicist such as Boileau. For Boileau, rules form, and form rules. Any excess of content may be redeemed by formal grace, while errors of syntax or untoward lexical freedom will damn the most pious sentiment or pleasing melody: Surtout qu’en vos écrits la langue révérée Dans vos plus grands excès vous soit toujours sacrée. En vain vous me frappez d’un son mélodieux Si le terme est impropre ou le tour vicieux; Mon esprit n’admet point un pompeux barbarisme, Ni d’un vers ampoulé l’orgueilleux solécisme. Sans la langue, en un mot, l’auteur le plus divin Est toujours, quoi qu’il fasse, un méchant écrivain.17 Above all, let our revered language remain sacred to you, even in your greatest moments of excess. You strike me in vain with a melodious sound if the word is improper or the turn of phrase vicious. My mind allows no pompous barbarism, nor any verse swollen with vain solecism. Do what he may, without the proper language, the most divine author is always a bad writer.

Rules governing syntax and lexicon supersede moral and even religious significance, or rather, they take over morality and recast it in their terms: their violation becomes more vicious than vice, while obedience to them can absolve sins only represented. Syntax is morality. This tradition brings an additional set of connotations to bear on Baudelaire’s insistence on aesthetic transgression and imbues these issues with the significance of sin. Where for Boileau violation of the norm is equated with moral turpitude and sensual pleasure is no excuse for impropriety of register or syntax, for Baudelaire the violation of the rule occasions beauty by producing “l’étonnement” (“astonishment”), which is “une des grandes jouissances causées par l’art et la littérature” (“one of the greatest sources of enjoyment in art and literature”). Even “jouissance” itself marks a departure from neoclassicist notions that art should be pretty and pleasing. And here,



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far from deserving even the praise “agréable” or “gracieux,” conformity with aesthetic norms promises at best “un beau banal” (“banal beauty”)—an idea Baudelaire challenges the reader even to conceive of. Baudelaire even invokes the conflation of religious or moral and aesthetic norms only to disparage it, accusing the establishment critic, “le professeur-juré,” of tyranny and idolatry, calling him “un impie qui se substitue à Dieu” (“an impious man taking the place of God”). “L’étonnement” becomes the signal effect of beauty, and “immatriculation” its constitutive characteristic; Baudelaire gives the dictum, “Le beau est toujours bizarre” (“The beautiful is always bizarre”).18 Boileau and Baudelaire meet, however, on the importance of “les limites de l’art,” which for both set the stage for aesthetic experience and our judgment of it. As in classicism, art gives pleasure— Baudelaire, however, stipulates that it be an illicit one. Baudelaire’s rhetoric in articulating this transgressive aesthetic forms a network of associations in which the formal norm is strongly implicated in and even indecipherable from norms understood to govern the moral, political, and cultural spheres. Baudelaire is keenly aware of these implications: “comment cette bizarrerie, nécessaire, incompressible, variée à l’infini, dépendante des milieux, des climats, des mœurs, de la race, de la religion et du tempérament de l’artiste, pourra-t-elle jamais être gouvernée, amendée, redressée par les règles utopique?”19 (how could this bizarrerie—necessary, incompressible, infinitely varied, dependent on its surroundings, climates, and customs, on the race, religion, and temperament of the artist— how could it ever be governed, improved, rectified by a set of utopian rules?) Universal rules cannot govern what is inherently contingent. The bizarre is at once historically and culturally contingent and ungovernable, and although Baudelaire asserts the bizarre’s dependence on the cultural sphere, he does not articulate the terms of that dependence, nor how the reciprocal relation might affect the cultural sphere in turn. The question of governance is not merely rhetorical; Baudelaire himself would like to believe he governs his creations, and he hardly qualifies (at this point) as a political radical or friend of democracy on any front. But this bizarreness may not reside firmly in the artist’s control; Baudelaire specifically stipulates that it must not be overly intentional or controlled, or it becomes “froidement bizarre,” grotesque. The achievement of this effect must be in part unconscious, naïve—art must, apparently, escape not only the rule of art but the rule of the artist. The essay “L’Exposition Universelle de 1855” is itself a complex and intensely hybrid prose creation—easily qualifying as bizarre in its



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own terminology. It begins in a scholarly enough vein. It discusses its “méthode de critique” and speaks in terms of an orderly universe—of hierarchy, order, and an “immense universal analogy” in which all plants, animals, and nations play their part. Clear lines and orders govern fields of behavior and mete out responsibility appropriate to the constituent parts of each. This insistence on an orderly universe is seemingly congruous with classicist perspectives, but Baudelaire immediately distances himself from the classicist tradition in art criticism, questioning its ability to incorporate the multiple forms beauty can take in an expanding world: “que dirait un Winkelmann moderne (nous en sommes pleins, la nation en regorge . . .) en face d’un produit chinois, produit étrange, bizarre, contourné dans sa forme, intense par sa couleur?”20 (what would a modern Winkelmann say (we have them aplenty, the country is overflowing with them . . .) when faced with a Chinese product, a product that is foreign, bizarre, its form elaborate, its color intense? Perhaps drawing on and revising Hugo’s geographic and cartographic rhetoric, Baudelaire here figures aesthetic experience as a visual confrontation between cultures. Far from denying the existence of a boundary between these cultures, however, Baudelaire’s critical project seems to rely upon it. The importance of the foreign culture lies in its difference, and the articulation of that difference is of great importance. The critical process appears as an invasion—a transformation of a kind, but one that occurs “par un phénomène de la volonté agissant sur l’imagination” (by a phenomenon of the will acting on the imagination) by which the critic must learn “de lui-même à participer au milieu qui a donné naissance à cette floraison insolite”21 (of his own accord to participate in the milieu that gave birth to this unusual flowering). By sheer act of will, the critic may enter as participant in the culture that has produced the artwork he contemplates. A series of reveries follows, which replicate and recast in a varying chain of geographical images this same pattern of entrance, of the critic as traveler in a strange land. He appears as solitary wanderer in the wilds, in the “fond du bois” with no companion but his gun, apparently in control of his destiny despite the wilderness of his surroundings. The critical process so presented is invasive certainly, contemplative or participatory, alternately. These formulations are problematic: both insightful and delusional. Unquestionably this is a strange approach to a “méthode de critique”—it is a critical process that does not entail any critical process—no judgment is being passed. What seems to link these first images is a sense of the critic as an invading force, free to contemplate, participate, to come and go as he pleases throughout the geographical locations that stand in, here, for art.



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What follows is far stranger. Baudelaire starts a chain of speculation by imagining that in place of sending a pedagogue to the wilderness, he could send “un homme du monde,” this time to the Orient. As in Hugo and many others of the period, the normative classicist aesthetic is figured as a boundary between East and West. The East also figures prominently and ubiquitously as a site of unknown sensual and sexual pleasures in both graphic and verbal representations and is already established as both a metaphor for the aesthetic and the metaphorical site of transgression. The association of sexual and aesthetic pleasure is here rendered explicitly and formally transgressive on both fronts. Whereas for Hugo and others the Orient might be viewed as a treasure trove of unfamiliar images, sensualities, and raw poetic material that might be mined by the poet, Baudelaire’s formulation of a visit to the Orient parts company with familiar patterns of Orientalist representation. Often in the Romantic period, the East figures as a sort of gigantic feminized Oriental body there to be penetrated, enjoyed, and subsequently regulated by visitors from the West.22 Baudelaire revises this model considerably, dramatically transgressing even the functioning of the signal trope of transgression: Si . . . je prends un homme du monde, un intelligent, et si je le transporte dans une contrée lointaine, . . . si les étonnements du débarquement sont grands, si l’accoutumance est plus ou moins longue, plus ou moins laborieuse, la sympathie sera tôt ou tard si vive, si pénétrante, qu’elle créera en lui un monde nouveau d’idées, monde qui fera partie intégrante de lui-même et qui l’accompagnera, sous la forme de souvenirs, jusqu’à la mort.23 If . . . I take a man of the world, an intelligent man, and transport him to a distant land, . . . if the surprises he meets on disembarking are great, if his acculturation is longer or shorter, more or less difficult, sooner or later the sympathy he feels will be so lively, so penetrating, that it will create in him a new world of ideas, a world that will become an integral part of himself and that will accompany him in the form of memories until his death.

Penetration and enjoyment remain central to Baudelaire’s depiction of aesthetic experience, but there are key differences in configuration. As will frequently occur when the transgressive aesthetic comes into play, gender roles and categories are surprisingly unstable—as Nathaniel Wing has argued of the prose poems: “as the notion of genre becomes unstable, the figuration of sexuality takes several surprising turns.”24 It does here as well, just as the genre of the critical essay is also taking several such “surprising turns.” “L’homme du



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monde” enters the distant land, but then the “étonnements” of that land enter him, penetrate him and in so doing create a new world—a sort of perpetual intellectual pregnancy of memories effected by the penetration of the Western subject by the Orient. In the description that follows, the sexually charged language grows more explicit as the experience of difference takes shape: ces femmes et ces hommes dont les muscles ne vibrent pas suivant l’allure classique de son pays, dont la démarche n’est pas cadencée selon le rythme accoutumé, dont le regard n’est pas projeté avec le même magnétisme, ces odeurs qui ne sont plus celles du boudoir maternel, ces fleurs mystérieuses dont la couleur entre dans l’œil déspotiquement, pendant que leur forme taquine le regard, ces fruits dont le goût trompe et déplace le sens et révèle au palais des idées qui appartiennent à l’odorat, tout ce monde d’harmonies nouvelles entrera lentement en lui, le pénétrera patiemment, comme la vapeur d’une étuve aromatisée; tout cette vitalité inconnue sera ajouté à sa vitalité propre.25 these women and men whose muscles don’t vibrate with the classical allure of his homeland, whose walk has a cadence so different from the accustomed rhythms, whose gaze does not project exactly the same magnetism, these scents that are not those of the maternal boudoir, these mysterious flowers whose colors enter the eye despotically as their form teases the attention, these fruits whose taste confuses and disorders the senses and reveals to the palate ideas pertaining to scent, this whole world of new harmonies enters him slowly, penetrates him patiently, like the steam of a scented bathhouse; all this unknown vitality will be added to his own.

The language is so sexually suggestive—even explicit—it needs little explication. The muscles of both men and women vibrate in an unaccustomed rhythm and so generate odors that both recall and distinguish themselves from the odors of the boudoir. That it is the “boudoir maternel” in this highly sexualized context could be construed even more transgressively than the rest—the association of the maternal and the sexual is overwhelmingly problematic for Baudelaire—but it also suggests the idea of a virgin boy who knows only his mother’s bedroom. In the case of “un homme du monde,” however, a different virginity may be implied—that of a man himself as yet unpenetrated. The passage draws on taboos both of incest and homosexuality to enhance the overall atmosphere of transgression—at every turn, the rhetoric raises the stakes. Gender roles and categories are highly unstable. The eye is both phallus and orifice here, both penetrator (as source of “le regard” “projeté” with a different magnetism) and



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penetrated (by deep color that “entre dans l’oeil déspotiquement”). The phallic gaze is a stock constituent of Orientalist art, but in that tradition it is the visitor, not the visited, who possesses it. Here, the beholder’s eye is an orifice coercively penetrated by its beheld object. This penetration starts violently or “despotically” but progresses slowly and patiently, and in the end it has a salubrious effect: “toute cette vitalité inconnue sera ajoutée à sa vitalité propre.” Although as the one penetrated he takes on the female “position,” the infusion from the foreign other revivifies and remasculates “l’homme du monde.” The position of “l’homme du monde” is ostensibly that of the critic, or the beholder. Yet there is much to suggest that this is also the position of the poet, the poet whose imagination impregnated by experience in time bears fruit (or flowers, as the case may be). Although this passage still appears under the section entitled “méthode de critique” in an essay on painting, it reads as an index of tropes and preoccupations central to Les Fleurs du mal, also published in its first form in 1855.26 Rhythm, scent, color, harmony; the synaesthetic interplay between them—all are hallmarks of Baudelaire’s own “fleurs mystérieuses,” as are the sensual fascination with the East and the preoccupation with the double function of the eye. The role of the classical as both absence and ground against which the present emerges is also key. Indeed, this passage provides a persuasive counterexample to Walter Benjamin’s claim that “none of the aesthetic reflections in Baudelaire’s theory of art presented modernism in its interpenetration [Durchdringung] with classical antiquity, something that was done in certain poems of the Fleurs du mal.”27 Baudelaire’s frame of reference here is the exotic, not the markedly temporalized urban landscape in which Benjamin locates the crux of Baudelaire’s conception of modernity. Elsewhere, however, Baudelaire explicitly figures the streets of Paris as a kind of wilderness themselves, their denizens as exotic others, allowing us to read the 1855 text as having a broader relevance for his work overall. The classical here appears as the sign of its absence, as it does in verse poems like “Le Cygne” (“The Swan”), but in this critical work, the unavailability of the classical produces no nostalgic ache, no “hélas!” The promise of unfamiliar, untried pleasures allows absence to be recognized without nostalgia, as reflected in the spatial, rather than temporal, figuration of the displacement. The unclassical, vibrating movement of the Orient is distinguished from “le rythme accoutumé” but is cadenced nonetheless, suggesting unthought-of possibilities for rhythm, elsewhere defined as the key ingredient of poetry. Since these passages precede the dictum “le beau est toujours bizarre,” the specifically and more theoretically articulated aesthetics



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of transgression appears under an already explicit rubric of sexual transgression. The uncertain position of gender and yet the importance of gender, the uncertain location of power and yet the importance of power, the revivifying power of cross-cultural fertilization and its undertones of exploitation, the undercurrent of coercion and violence—all these are more or less constant factors in Baudelaire’s admittedly mutable aesthetics. This aesthetics of transgression is of crucial importance not only within the context of Baudelaire’s critical writings but in his own poetic practice as well. The combinations and recombinations of elements vary, and, as seen, he does not maintain this attitude consistently. He does practice it, however, and the practice increasingly emphasizes the violent nature of the transgression. It finds its most complete enactment in the prose poem.

P OSING

THE

P ROSE P OEM : P OE ’S P ROSE

C’est à la fois par poésie et à travers la poesie —“Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe”

As Barbara Johnson has noted, the prose poem calls into question its own status with regard to the generic categories it names, but its disruptive potential is not limited to the questionable status of a subgenre.28 The term “prose poem” unites in a noun phrase two opposing terms, terms so starkly opposed that each qualifies as itself by not being the other, or at least so they were understood by critics in the period immediately preceding Baudelaire’s own. The term both articulates an intransigent generic and functional difference and offers itself as a bridge across it: it draws the line it also crosses, with the effect that the “prose poem” interrogates not only its own generic status but the stability of the categories “Poetry” and “Prose.” From a classicist perspective, this hardly recommends it as a form. L’Abbé Desfontaines complained of the prose poem: “c’est abuser des termes et renoncer aux idées claires et distinctes,” as did Voltaire: “on confond toutes les idées, on transpose les limites des Arts, quand on donne le nom de Poème à la Prose.”29 For Baudelaire and his transgressive aesthetics, however, such objections would only have enhanced the form’s attraction, since boundaries between art forms and genres were of particular theoretical and practical interest. Baudelaire had explored the comparative seductive efficacy of poetry and prose in La Fanfarlo and had incorporated prose transpositions of his own verse both in that prose work and in Du vin et du



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Il est un point par lequel la nouvelle a une supériorité, même sur le poëme. Le rythme est nécessaire au développement de l’idée de beauté, qui est le but le plus grand et le plus noble du poëme. Or, les artifices du rythme sont un obstacle insurmontable à ce développement minutieux de pensées et d’expressions qui a pour objet la vérité.31 There is one point in which the short story can claim superiority, even over the poem. Rhythm is necessary to the development of the idea of beauty, which is a poem’s greatest and noblest goal. Yet, the artifices of rhythm are an insurmountable obstacle to the minute development of thoughts and expressions that have truth as their object.

This passage establishes several key distinctions. First, it identifies rhythm as a defining element of poetry since rhythm is necessary for the achievement of poetry’s greatest goal. It further establishes beauty as that goal. Yet it places “les artifices du rythme” directly at odds with the communication of truth. Truth and beauty are divided from each other along the fault line of form—the identical line that, following the same logic, divides poetry from prose. It is remarkable that the necessary dividing line between beauty and truth is form, and the separation of truth from beauty occurs only as ancillary to a formal intervention: beauty requires the presence of rhythm, which unfortunately precludes the communication of truth. Content or aim seems to dictate form—beauty requires rhythm— but form in turn dictates content—rhythm obscures truth. Despite form’s dictatorial and philosophical prominence, however, this is not a poetics of pure formalism. The poem is still oriented toward some kind of communication, just not the communication of “thoughts and expressions.” The poem holds as its highest goal not the creation or even the embodiment of beauty, but “the development of the idea of beauty”; the short story, “the development of thoughts and expressions” with truth as its object. Both engage in structuring intellectual arguments, but each form draws on different features of the linguistic medium. Poetry and the short story, the prose form that comes closest to poetry in its concentration and brevity, are thus established as analogous and mutually exclusive forms that aspire to the achievement of analogous and mutually exclusive goals by analogous and mutually exclusive uses of language. From the outset of this discussion, Baudelaire places poetry and prose in a strict hierarchical relation in which poetry holds the



haschich, efforts that reveal a long-standing interest in the relationship of poetry to prose.30 He discusses this relationship in greatest detail in the critical work “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe”:

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superior position: the short story “n’est pas situé à une aussi grande élévation que la poésie pure,” (does not share the greatly elevated position of pure poetry) but is more varied and accessible in its effects. Baudelaire’s own formulation draws a great deal on common notions of the transcendent potential of poetry: it opposes quality and rarity to breadth and variety, with poetry and prose occupying essentially vertical and horizontal orientations.32 In comparison to “le but le plus grand et le plus noble du poëme,” the ability to “fournir des produits plus variés et plus facilement appréciables pour le commun des lecteurs” (supply more varied products that are more easily appreciated by the common reader) sounds like very backhanded praise.33 From Baudelaire’s pen these marketplace advantages hardly are couched in terms that suggest artistic triumph; they have more the tone of a bourgeois greengrocer describing the virtues of his new display case: “De plus, l’auteur d’une nouvelle a à sa disposition une multitude de tons, de nuances de langage, le ton raisonneur, le sarcastique, l’humoristique” (What is more, the author of a short story has at his disposition a multitude of tones and nuances of language: reason, sarcasm, humor), interesting features in themselves, but all repudiated by poetry in the strictest terms for being “comme des dissonances, des outrages à l’idée de beauté pure” (like dissonant outrages to the idea of pure beauty). In the next sentence, he insists again on an absolute separation of the genres on the formal grounds of rhythm, here styled as “l’instrument le plus utile” (the most useful instrument). On this basis he disparages even Poe’s efforts at creating a poetic prose, a prose that aspires toward pure beauty. Lacking as they do this rhythmic utility, such efforts though “souvent heureux” (“often happy”) serve only to “démontrer la force des vrais moyens adaptés aux buts correspondants” (demonstrate the strength of the true methods adapted to corresponding ends). In other words, Baudelaire would seem to argue that attempts at poetic prose reinforce the generic distinction they seem to challenge: in attempting to cross the line between poetry and prose, they redraw it more indelibly. Despite the suggestion of a vertical/horizontal axis, the forms are parallel in that they cannot intersect, and although parallel, they are not equal, but hierarchically arranged: one aims toward truth and the other, superior, toward the transcendence of that truth through beauty. These distinctions are very clear. It is of great interest, therefore, that Baudelaire would set out on such an extensive project of writing doomed, by his own estimation, to certain failure, and that the conception of the prose poem project roughly coincides with this essay. It is also of great interest that the



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list of short story assets—those repudiated by poetry— enumerates precisely those stylistic features for which Baudelaire’s own prose poems are well-known: “mercantalism,” increased detail, an increasingly disruptive variety of rhythm and tone.34 This parallel has not gone unnoticed: J.A. Hiddleston, for example, cites the same passage from the Poe essay and speaks to the temptation to substitute “prose poem” for Baudelaire’s “short story”—so marked are the parallels— but concludes that the contradictions between the critical text’s argument and later practice indicate nothing more than a premature stage in the theorization of the prose poem.35 Baudelaire insisted on the right to contradict himself and exercised it often, but when stated theory and practice are so dramatically at odds—so symmetrically and, as internal evidence in individual prose poems would suggest, so highly self-consciously at odds—the nature of those contradictions bears closer and more vigorous examination than might be due a simpler, or even a more subtle change of heart. On the strength of the doublets, the prose poems have been read in conjunction with the verse poems since their publication, but Baudelaire wrote in three genres. The juxtaposition of these different genres on a single topic provides an initiation into modes and methods of Baudelaire’s self-interactive oeuvre. I have chosen to sustain the focus on beauty, since this will also illustrate how the strongly articulated transgressive aesthetic of 1855 operates in relation to other aesthetic positions Baudelaire sets forth. I have already discussed at some length several excerpts from the critical prose writings. In what follows, I offer a reading of the verse poems “La Beauté” and “Hymne à La Beauté,” and then consider the prose poem “La Chambre double” in light of the other genres and the other genres in light of it. I begin with Baudelaire’s perfect sonnet, formally the most traditional and strict of all the texts I discuss:

“L A B E AUTÉ ” Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre, Et mon sein, où chacun s’est meurtri tour à tour, Est fait pour inspirer au poëte un amour Éternel et muet ainsi que la matière. Je trône dans l’azur comme un sphinx incompris; J’unis un coeur de neige à la blancheur des cygnes; Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes, Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.



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Car j’ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants, De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles: Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartés éternelles!36 I am beautiful, o mortals, as a dream of stone, and my breast, where each has bruised himself in turn, is made to inspire in poets a love as eternal and mute as matter. I am enthroned in the azure sky like an uncomprehended sphinx; I unite a heart of snow with the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces lines, and I never cry and I never laugh. Before my grand postures, in which I imitate the proudest monuments, poets will consume their days in austere studies. For I have, to fascinate these docile lovers, pure mirrors that make all things more beautiful: my eyes, my large eyes of eternal clarity!

This version of beauty at once seduces and repels, inspires poets and silences them, and is the origin and the death of poetry. This aesthetics is the inverse of the aesthetics of transgression that values strangeness, variety, and movement. The opposition could not be more explicit. This beauty is literally enough the embodiment of stasis, calcification, and pallor. The first words begin in the most static way possible, with a simple copulative statement of identity “Je suis belle.” Grammatically, the “ô” identifies direct address, while spatially, the letter “ô”— itself a bounded circle of empty space—maintains a space between address and addressee that parallels the metaphysical chasm the address identifies between speaker and audience. The identification of this metaphysical distinction coincides perfectly with the end of the hemistich, with the exclamation point strongly emphasizing the caesura. Considering its inclusion in a collection that so problematizes the relationship of form to content, taking as one of its central themes the creation of beautiful poetry out of ignoble material (“J’ai pétri de la boue et j’en ai fait de l’or”), this poem is striking in the comparatively straightforward relationship it sets out. Les Fleurs du mal as a whole is not remarkable for radical violations of French versification rules—on this level, Baudelaire does not make inroads much deeper than those of Victor Hugo and is far from the “vers libre” that was to follow him. Even in context, however, this particular poem stands out in its strict adherence to convention. When the speaker (the embodiment of the classical beauty that inspired those



Les poètes, devant mes grandes attitudes, Que j’ai l’air d’emprunter aux plus fiers monuments, Consumeront leurs jours en d’austères études;

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rules) announces “Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes,” she offers ample proof in the form of her purported utterance: the poem indulges in only a single instance of the weakest form of enjambment from line to line and rigidly observes the caesura. The verbs associated with this Beauty are equally striking by their lack of motion: “Je suis,” “Je trône,” “J’unis,” “Je hais,” “j’ai l’air,” “j’ai”; the only verbs of possible motion (certainly emotion) are included to mark the eternal impossibility of their occurrence: “jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.” The emphasis given to the absence of laughter gains significance if the role of the comic in Baudelaire’s aesthetics is taken into account, but it also reinforces the atmosphere of classical drama suggested by the opening apostrophe and the suggestion that, rather than moving naturally or fluidly per se, Beauty takes a series of “grandes attitudes” in the fashion of actors in classical theater, an allusion also supported by the reference to unity. The will to unity is so strong here that it fails to participate even in the difference of comedy and tragedy, so strong that it merges in its purity even fine distinctions between shades of pure white. The poem “Hymne à la Beauté,” often considered a pendant to “La Beauté,” figures a beauty more in keeping with the aesthetics Baudelaire sets forth elsewhere in the collection.37 In this collection that celebrates the vacillations between “spleen” and “idéal,” the scales are usually tipped in favor of the darker pole. Here, as in most cases, even the untouchable “idéal” is “always already” defiled or herself a defiler: Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme, O Beauté? Ton regard, infernal et divin, Verse confusément le bienfait et le crime, Et l’on peut pour cela te comparer au vin. Tu contiens dans ton œil le couchant et l’aurore; Tu répands des parfums comme un soir orageux; Tes baisers sont un philtre et ta bouche une amphore Qui font le héros lâche et l’enfant courageux. Sors-tu du gouffre noir ou descends-tu des astres? Le Destin charmé suit tes jupons comme un chien; Tu sèmes au hasard la joie et les désastres, Et tu gouvernes tout et ne réponds de rien. Tu marches sur des morts, Beauté, dont tu te moques; De tes bijoux l’Horreur n’est pas le moins charmant, Et le Meurtre, parmi tes plus chères breloques, Sur ton ventre orgueilleux danse amoureusement. L’éphémère ébloui vole vers toi, chandelle, Crépite, flambe et dit: Bénissons ce flambeau!



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Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l’enfer, qu’importe, O Beauté! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu! Si ton œil, ton souris, ton pied, m’ouvrent la porte D’un Infini que j’aime et n’ai jamais connu? De Satan ou de Dieu, qu’importe? Ange ou Sirène, Qu’importe, si tu rends,—fée aux yeux de velours, Rythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine!— L’univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?38 Do you come from heaven or from the abyss, o Beauty? Your gaze, infernal and divine, confusedly pours out beneficence and crime, and in this you are comparable to wine. Your eye contains the sunset and the dawn, you pour forth perfumes like a stormy evening, your kisses are a philtre, your mouth an amphora that renders heroes base and children brave. Do you come from a black chasm or descend from the stars? Charmed Fate follows your skirts like a dog, you sow joy and disasters at random, and you govern all and are responsible for nothing. You walk on the dead, Beauty, as you mock them. Horror is not the least charming of your jewels, and murder, one of your dearest trinkets, dances erotically on your proud belly. Dazzled, the ephemeral moth flies toward you, Candle, crackles, flames and cries: Bless this fiery torch! The gasping lover leaning over his beloved has the air of a dying man caressing his tomb. Whether you come from heaven or from hell—what does it matter, Beauty? Innocent, horrifying, tremendous monster, if your glance, your smile, your foot, opens a door for me to the Infinite I love and never knew? From Satan or from God—what does it matter? Angel or Siren, what matter? if you render—velvet-eyed fairy, rhythm, perfume, gleam, o my only queen!—the universe less hideous and the moments less heavy?

In direct contrast to the emphatic stasis that opens “La Beauté,” “Hymne à la Beauté” launches immediately into dramatic motion, a motion no less vehement for its uncertainty of origin. Furthermore, while the question of Beauty’s origin is to remain both interrogated and unresolved throughout the poem, a complementary certainty is nonetheless implied: if Beauty has come from somewhere else, she has crossed some boundary, passed from immortal sphere (whether heavenly or infernal) to mortal (hence temporal) realm—she is not now in another world, but here, and not a native, so to speak. In



L’amoureux pantelant incliné sur sa belle A l’aire d’un moribond caressant son tombeau.

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crossing between realms, she has rendered the question of “which realm” unimportant, and indeed such polar opposites are blurred and melded in her.39 Her gaze, both mortal and divine, itself produces moral confusion. Her eye encompasses both setting and rising sun— both crossings of a line, the horizon, from night to day and back. What matters, it seems, is the crossing, the very action of it. In contrast with “La Beauté,” the verbs associated with this “Beauté” are all active: “Viens-tu,” “sors-tu,” “Tu contiens,” “Tu répands,” “sors-tu,” “descends-tu,” “tu sèmes,” “tu gouvernes,” “tu marches,” and so on. The majority are verbs of motion; the others, still transitive, “action” verbs of plenitude and power. This power, however, is different in kind from the power wielded by the first version of beauty. In “La Beauté,” the speaker emphasizes separation, rules, the importance of lines. She likens herself to a “sphinx incompris,” but she spells out for us all the questions that the speaker in the second poem demands of the Beauty who never speaks (the speaker in the end decides, the answers don’t matter). Beauty as we see her in “Hymne” transcends good and evil not because she is above them, removed from the fray, as the first goddess suggests of herself, but because she breaks all the rules with impunity—she has all the power, and answers to no authority. She is closer to the Hugolian-Genius poetics discussed above, but with an important displacement: it is Beauty, and not the poet, who escapes subjection to rules here. In this poem, the figuration of the ideal occurs through movement and sensory stimulation and is imbued with and indicative of temporality. Beauty finds the source of her power not in “des grandes attitudes” but essentially in the stuff of fashion—jewels, skirts, wine, perfumes—all sensory, changeable, consumable goods. Despite this ephemeral orientation, however, her effect is such that it opens a door through which the speaker senses he may pass from the temporal world. Eternity still “reigns,” but it occupies a permeable rather than an inviolate realm. The value of this Beauty derives ultimately not from her own immortal origins, but from the fact that she has come from “wherever” and shown the poet the possibility—ironically—of transcending the very temporal world he seems to value in his descriptions of her.40 By the end, Beauty is both a sign of and a means of passage—herself a movement, and a mark of a crossing having occurred. This crossing between eternal or atemporal realms—between divine and mortal—is figured in explicitly sexual terms, although it should be noted that gendered positions remain stable in both poems, with Beauty as female, poet as male. “Hymne” espouses an aesthetics more at home in the Fleurs du mal collection as a whole. On the



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expository level, at least, the poem is also in keeping with aesthetics of movement valued in “L’Exposition Universelle de 1855.” On the level of form and language, however, the poem is strongly derivative of Romantic poetry—even consciously so. In terms of imagery and structure, “Hymne à la Beauté” plays with Romantic emblems just as “La Beauté” plays with the Classical. In an analysis that reads the poem’s “weaknesses” of rhetoric and imagery as “expressive tokens of defeat,” Graham Chesters notes that it opens with “a Romantic commonplace, the morally ambiguous nature of beauty” in a stanza structured by questions stemming from this paradox, a stanza that ultimately closes “with a line which squanders its syllables on a comparison explicitly introduced and lacking any imaginative sparkle.” Chesters views this and other “lapses” as instances of ironic self-reflexivity that the poet uses to “puncture his own rhetoric.41 I concur with this reading of self-reflexivity, even self-parody. In terms of Baudelaire’s aesthetic affinities and conflicts, I contend that “Hymne” represents a mediating term between the classicist aesthetics of “La Beauté” and the prose poems’ full poetic enactment of a transgressive aesthetics; indeed, the poem suggests that Romanticism itself may have functioned in the same way. The text reprises this mediating role in the even more selfreferential and ironic prose poem “La Chambre double,” a text that further emphasizes the continued centrality of these verse poems in Baudelaire’s shifting aesthetic and poetic projects.

“L A C H A MBRE

DOUBLE ”

This prose poem encapsulates the relationship of Baudelaire’s verse to the prose poetry, condensing it into a “double” single work of prose. The structure is symmetrical: nine paragraph/strophes arranged on either side of a line devoted to the image of a door, with the first “chambre” lyrical, poeticized and idealized, and the second “chambre” more prosaic, vulgar, and very dark. In keeping with the structure of the poem, I will begin with a reading of the first section without reference to the second part, and then examine the effects of the latter half on our reading of the first. Une chambre qui ressemble à une rêverie, une chambre véritablement spirituelle, où l’atmosphère stagnante est légèrement teintée de rose et de bleu. L’âme y prend un bain de paresse, aromatisé par le regret et le désir.— C’est quelque chose de crépusculaire, de bleuâtre et de rosâtre; un rêve de volupté pendant une éclipse.



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Les meubles ont des formes allongées, prostrées, alanguies. Les meubles ont l’air de rêver; on les dirait doués d’une vie somnambulique, comme le végétal et le minéral. Les étoffes parlent une langue muette, comme les fleurs, comme les ciels, comme les soleils couchants. Sur les murs nulle abomination artistique. Relativement au rêve pur, à l’impression non analysée, l’art défini, l’art positif est un blasphème. Ici, tout a la suffisante clarté et la délicieuse obscurité de l’harmonie. Une senteur infinitésimale du choix le plus exquis, à laquelle se mêle une très-légère humidité, nage dans cette atmosphère, où l’esprit sommeillant est bercé par des sensations de serre chaude. La mousseline pleut abondamment devant les fenêtres et devant le lit; elle s’épanche en cascades neigeuses. Sur ce lit est couché l’Idole, la souveraine des rêves. Mais comment est-elle ici? Qui l’a amenée? quel pouvoir magique l’a installée sur ce trône de rêverie et de volupté? Qu’importe? la voilà! je la reconnais. Voilà bien ces yeux dont la flamme traverse le crépuscule; ces subtiles et terribles mirettes, que je reconnais à leur effrayante malice! Elles attirent, elles subjuguent, elles dévorent le regard de l’imprudent qui les contemple. Je les ai souvent étudiées, ces étoiles noires qui commandent la curiosité et l’admiration. A quel démon bienveillant dois-je d’être ainsi entouré de mystère, de silence, de paix et de parfums? O béatitude! ce que nous nommons généralement la vie, même dans son expansion la plus heureuse, n’a rien de commun avec cette vie suprême dont j’ai maintenant connaissance et que je savoure minute par minute, seconde par seconde! Non! il n’est plus de minutes, il n’est plus de secondes! Le temps a disparu; c’est l’Éternité qui règne, une éternité de délices!42 A room like a dream, a truly spiritual room, where the stagnant atmosphere is gently tinged with pink and blue. There the soul bathes in idleness, scented with regret and desire. –It’s something crepuscular, bluish and rose-colored, a dream of voluptuousness during an eclipse. The furniture’s elongate forms are prostrate, languid. The furniture seems to be dreaming; endowed, one might say, with a somnambular life, like vegetables and minerals. The upholstery speaks a mute language like flowers, like skies, like setting suns. No artistic abomination on the walls. Compared to the pure dream, to the unanalyzed impression, any definite art, any positive art, is a blasphemy. Here, everything is just clear enough and has the delicious obscurity of harmony. An infinitesimal fragrance of the most exquisite quality, mingled with a very faint humidity, swims in the atmosphere where the drowsy spirit is cradled in hothouse sensations.



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There they are, those eyes whose flame traverses twilight, those subtle and terrible eyes that I recognize by their horrifying malice! They beckon, they subjugate, they devour the imprudent gaze of all who contemplate them. I have often studied them, these black stars that command such curiosity and wonder. To what benevolent demon am I indebted for being thus surrounded by mystery, silence, peace and perfumes? Oh Beatitude! that which we generally call life, even in its happiest expansiveness, has nothing in common with this supreme life of which I now have knowledge and which I savor minute by minute, second by second! No! There are no more minutes, no more seconds! Time has disappeared, Eternity reigns, an eternity of delights!

This first section of the piece opens under the signs of both poetry and prose. For Baudelaire, the realm of poetry is the realm of dream, the realm of correspondences—often expressed in simile—between the material and spiritual. The dream is the emblem of poetry. The first lines contain markers also, however, of prose style: the articulation of the simile seems overextended and the word “véritablement” in particular has a prosy, even popular quality. The “véritablement,” if we take it literally, undercuts the simile’s functioning as a trope based on similarity not contiguity or identity; if we take the word as an empty throwaway or augmentative, it undermines the communicative function of prose and weakens its claims on the articulation of “truth.” The text thus at once announces its impurity as poetry and its contested relationship to prose.43 Here, however, this prosepoem tension appears only very sporadically throughout the first half of the text. This section otherwise recalls the efforts Baudelaire elsewhere disparages to create “contes purement poétiques” (purely poetic tales), prose works that have “un simple but de beauté” (a simple goal of beauty), efforts he deems doomed to failure because of the unavailability of rhythm.44 The text is not without rhythm, though, despite its lack of lineation and versification. Syntactic, syllabic, and morphemic repetition, such as the abundance of liquid consonants and key blends as well as the more obvious repetition of key words creates a rhythm of its own. Any attempts to scan this prose into alexandrines or octosyllabics under the strictures of French prosody will yield no results. However,



An abundance of muslin rains over the windows and bed, overflowing in snowy cascades. On the bed—the Idol, the sovereign of dreams. How is she here? Who has brought her? What magical power has installed her on this throne of reverie and pleasure? What does it matter? There she is! I recognize her.

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other forms of scansion produce other, less regular, patterns, patterns suggestive of the metrical feet central to English prosody:

x / x x/ x x x / x x x / aromatisé par le regret et le désir. [ x x x x x] / x x / C’est quelque chose de crépusculaire x x / xx x / de bleuâtre et de rosâtre x / x x x / x / x x / un rêve de volupté pendant une éclipse. x / x x / x x / Les meubles ont des formes allongées, x / x x / prostrées, alanguies. x / x / x x / Les meubles ont l’air de rêver [x x x x x] / x / x x x / on les dirait doués d’une vie somnambulique

Prosy interventions markedly disturb the rhythm and the sonority of the poetic register, but become less frequent as the vision extends. The “meter” is of course far from regular, but especially if we hear vowel length as suggesting stress (plausible, considering meter’s classical quantitative past), portions of the text scan into approximations of English metrical feet—extraordinary in a language for which tonic accent and accentual meter are anathema. Baudelaire was well-steeped in English prosody, however; he was a student of Poe’s poetic theory and of English meter more broadly through his work as translator, a role I discuss at greater length in chapter 3.45 The first lines of “La Chambre double” echo lines from Baudelaire’s preface to his translation of Poe’s “Philosophy of Furniture”: “Quel est celui d’entre nous qui, dans les longues heures de loisirs, n’a pris un délicieux plaisir à se construire un appartement-modèle, un domicile idéal, un rêvoir?”46 (Who among us has not, during long hours of leisure, taken a delicious pleasure in constructing a model apartment, an ideal domicile, a dream room?) Furthermore, in addition to his actual experience as translator from the English, Baudelaire employs the concept of translation as a figure for the creative process in his theoretical writings, particularly with reference to his idea of “correspondences” among



/ x / x / x x / L’âme y prend un bain de paresse,

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the arts and between the arts and the world of things, a concept clearly at work in this prose poem. The idea of translation is firmly in place and its practice abounds. Baudelaire had been—textually speaking—in the position of “l’homme du monde” as he imagines it in the “Exposition”: abroad in a foreign poetics where the verses “don’t vibrate with the classical allure of his homeland” and where “movement is not cadenced in the accustomed rhythm.” The images of this first “chambre” are certainly drawn from Baudelaire’s own territory: keynote words, images, and sensations here function as signposts guiding the reader in and around Baudelaire’s oeuvre, touchstones of an emotional dialect of regret and desire. The interior of fabrics, textures, still air, and perfumes corresponds with flowers, skies, stars, and the crepuscular world of setting suns—together they trace female contours and indicate eternity. This “chambre” forms an index and plot summary of much of Les Fleurs du mal. More specifically, the overall depiction of beauty blends aspects of both “Beauté” verse poems discussed above. The emphasis on stasis recalls the sonnet “La Beauté,” and here too stasis is accentuated by verbal passivity. The first paragraph-strophe in fact has no main verb—it is composed solely of dependent clauses. The first verb, “ressemble,” inaugurates the metaphoric and evokes the rhetoric of analogy between the spiritual or dream world and the world of things often employed in the verse poetry. The other verb as a copulative is hence further indicative of “l’atmosphère stagnante” that is its subject. Indeed, the first four paragraph-strophes contain strikingly few verbs, and of nine (excluding “on les dirait,” which I discuss below), six are forms of the static “être” (“to be”) and “avoir” (“to have”) while “parlent” (“speak”) is silenced. As in “La Beauté,” the poetry of stasis is also the poetry of silence, an association that engenders a chain of similes (also a figure prominent in the sonnet): “comme les fleurs, comme les ciels, comme les soleils couchants” (“like flowers, like skies, like setting suns”). “Comme les fleurs” again reminds us to consider the verse; “les ciels” and “soleils couchants” also refer to particularly important poems.47 The self-citation also works at the figurative level, again emphasizing simile as a favorite figure in Baudelaire’s verse.48 The chain thus reproduces in condensed form effects that are present throughout the prose poem passage: rhythm, simile, selfreference. What is more, this prose poem, first published in 1862, reproduces elements of “La Beauté” from the 1857 text that were altered in the edition of 1861.49 Here, the “mirettes” (a slang term for eyes) of the Idol’s eyes echo (prosaically) the “purs miroirs” of La Beauté’s eyes, while the speaker’s admission that “je les ai souvent



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etudiées” recalls the “études” of the poets depicted in the sonnet, and the “étoiles noires” he studies recall the “étoiles” that appeared mirrored in La Beauté’s eyes. Although aspects of both verse poems are interspersed throughout “La Chambre double,” the second section of this first “chambre” more directly recalls “Hymne à la Beauté.” A shift from stasis to slight motion takes place in the fifth paragraph-strophe, where the verbs “se mèle” (“mix”) and “nage” (“swim”) both name the kind of action the poem engages in (mixing discourses and blending poems) and form a logical extension from the “prendre un bain” of the second strophe. The watery verbs “nager” (“to swim”), “pleuvoir” (“to rain”) and “s’épancher” (“to overflow”) all indicate movement, but the motion, as the speaker explains, is of a sleepy rocking nature, hardly “le mouvement qui déplace les lignes.”50 It does, however, provide a transition to the more active realm of the end of the poem’s first half. This section reads as a prose translation of “Hymne à la Beauté:” While “mirettes” refer back to the “purs miroirs” of “La Beauté,” the eyes are also said to “Traverse le crépuscule,” recalling the eyes in the “Hymne” that contain “le couchant et l’aurore.” Where the verse poem reiterates questions of origin (“viens-tu”; “sors-tu,” and so on) as a sort of refrain then elaborated throughout three separate strophes, the prose poem has “Comment est-elle ici? Qui l’a amenée? quel pouvoir magique l’a installée sur ce trône de rêverie et de volupté? Qu’importe?”: the same thrice-repeated question and the identical resolution here appears compressed in a single passage. The verse poem speculates on whether Satan has sent Beauté; the prose poem wonders which demon; the verse’s “O Beauté!” becomes “O béatitude!” Of course he recognizes her, as should his readers. Both visions initiate the beholder into the reign of eternity. Beauty as object subjugates the beholder—it is the object who has, as in “L’Exposition Universelle,” the despotic, cannibalistic power to absorb and devour the gaze of the speaker while her own gaze retains a phallic function. By the end, the subjugation is complete, but the speaker is a willing subject and presents himself (along with time) to be devoured. Still playing off “Hymne à la Beauté,” in which Beauty’s eye opens the door on the infinite, here the door opens to the invasion of the temporal, which at first looks every bit as spectral from the perspective of the ideal world of dreams as dreams do from the perspective of contingent reality. The idol of the first “chambre” who gradually takes over as the only reality and vanquishes time is replaced by the Specter of temporality, which banishes “l’Idole” and



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unmasks the ideal dream:

Et puis un Spectre est entré. C’est un huissier qui vient me torturer au nom de la loi; une infâme concubine qui vient crier misère et ajouter les trivialités de sa vie aux douleurs de la mienne; ou bien le sauteruisseau d’un directeur de journal qui réclame la suite du manuscrit. La chambre paradisiaque, l’idole, la souveraine des rêves, la Sylphide, comme disait le grand René, toute cette magie a disparu au coup brutal frappé par le Spectre. Horreur! je me souviens! je me souviens! Oui! ce taudis, ce séjour de l’éternel ennui, est bien le mien. Voici les meubles sots, poudreux, écornés; la cheminée sans flamme et sans braise, souillée de crachats; les tristes fenêtres où la pluie a tracé des sillons dans la poussière; les manuscrits, raturés ou incomplets; l’almanach où le crayon a marqué les dates sinistres! Et ce parfum d’un autre monde, dont je m’enivrais avec une sensibilité perfectionnée, hélas! il est remplacé par une fétide odeur de tabac mêlée à je ne sais quelle nauséabonde moisissure. On respire ici maintenant le ranci de la désolation. Dans ce monde étroit, mais si plein de dégoût, un seul objet connu me sourit: la fiole de laudanum; une vieille et terrible amie; comme toutes les amies, hélas! féconde en caresses et en traîtrises. Oui! oui! le Temps a reparu; le Temps règne en souverain maintenant; et avec le hideux vieillard est revenu tout son démoniaque cortège de Souvenirs, de Regrets, de Spasmes, de Peurs, d’Angoisses, de Cauchemars, de Colères et de Névroses. Je vous assure que les secondes maintenant sont fortement et solennellement accentuées, et chacune, en jaillissant de la pendule, dit: > Il n’y a qu’une Seconde dans la vie humaine qui ait mission d’annoncer une bonne nouvelle, la bonne nouvelle qui cause à chacun une inexplicable peur. Oui! le Temps règne, il a repris sa brutale dictature. Et il me pousse, comme si j’étais un boeuf, avec son double aiguillon.—> (1: 281–282)51 But a low, terrible knock thundered at the door and, as in hellish dreams, I felt as if my stomach had been struck with a pitchfork. And then, a Specter entered. It was a bailiff who had come to torture me in the name of the law; an infamous concubine who had come to complain of her misery and add the trivialities of her life to the sorrows



Mais un coup terrible, lourd, a retenti à la porte, et, comme dans les rêves infernaux, il m’a semblé que je reçevais un coup de pioche dans l’estomac.

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of mine; or perhaps the errand boy of some newspaper editor demanding the rest of the manuscript.

Horror! I remember! Yes! This hovel, this dwelling of eternal ennui is really mine. Here it is, the stupid, dusty, broken-down furniture; the hearth empty of fire, of embers, filthy with spittle, the sad windows where the rain has traced furrows in the dust, the manuscripts, erased or unfinished, the calendar with all the sinister dates marked in pencil! And the otherworldly perfume, which had intoxicated me in my state of perfected sensibility, alas! it has been replaced by the fetid odor of tobacco mixed with I don’t know what nauseating molds. Now, one breathes rancid desolation here. In this world, so narrow but so full of disgust, one sole familiar object smiles on me: the vial of laudanum, an old and terrible mistress, like all mistresses, alas! fecund in caresses and betrayal. Yes! yes! Time has returned, Time reigns sovereign now, and the hideous oldster has brought his demonic entourage of Memories, Regrets, Spasms, Fears, Anguish, Nightmares, Rages and Nerves. I assure you that the seconds now come heavily and solemnly accentuated, and each says as it springs from the clock, “I am Life! Unbearable, implacable Life!” There is only one second in human life that has the mission of announcing good news, the good news that strikes in each of us an inexplicable fear. Yes! Time reigns! He has resumed his brutal dictatorship. And he prods me with his double goad as if I were an ox, “Gee up, donkey! Sweat, damned slave! Live!”

The structural relation between the two halves is extremely controlled. Certain mirror substitutions are made quite obviously— “l’Idole” becomes “le Spectre,” “rêverie” becomes “les rêves infernaux,” stagnancy is replaced by violence. Even as “l’idole” appears in the narration of her disappearance, she has lost her universalized “majuscule” status—the present “Idole” of the first “chambre” becomes the absent “idole” of the second. Where the furniture was “allongées, prostrées, alanguies,” here it is “sots, boudreux, écornés.” An alternate mirroring structure is employed as well. After the pickaxe to the stomach, the constituents of the earlier



The pardisical room, the idol, the sovereign of dreams, the Sylphide, as the great René would say, all of this magic has disappeared at the Specter’s brutal knock.

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Chambre 1

Chambre 2

“vie somnambulique” scent/humidity windows bed recognition

recognition furniture windows stench/moisture laudanum

The mirroring is not perfectly symmetrical on all counts, however; images also appear refracted, multiplied. The idol appeared as a unified, unifying female whole in the first chamber, but the specter breaks down into three roles and two genders: bailiff, mistress, publisher, the uncertainty of origin and identity mocking the earlier rapturous “Qu’importe!” The temporal and the financial perspective sullies every image: the female figure appears no longer as sovereign queen but as sniveling mistress, one-third of the fallen triptych. Where recognition was before figured as a delight, directed toward an ideal other, here it is a horror, turned inward on the self. The metaphoric rain of muslin here becomes literal rain that etches in grime. The first chamber, which might be said to operate on the dual matrices of allusion and illusion, is literalized and exposed. Even allusion is explicit here, with the casual reference to Chateaubriand (Mémoires d’outre-tombe). Baudelaire’s own writing, which is cited in references to poetry woven subtly into the text of the first “chambre,” here appears again but in a far less flattering light, in the form of literal unfinished manuscripts and the scribbles on a calendar. The phrase “bonne nouvelle,” twice reiterated in the second “chambre,” the second time italicizing its irony, refers to death but also functions as an oblique reference to Baudelaire’s own “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe.” The section of “Notes nouvelles” devoted to the “nouvelle” or short story form is, as we have seen, of particular importance to the prose poem. It is the strictures set forth there that Baudelaire resolutely and symmetrically violates—even as he fulfills the mirror image of his own prescription. In this prose poem, the first half resembles the prose attempts at pure beauty he disparages; the second half, the “fallen half,” well fits the description of the literal “bonnes nouvelles,” the good short stories, whose features Baudelaire articulated—“une



half are transposed into this version in mirrored form, in reverse order and crossing at the window:

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multitude de tons, de nuances de langage, le ton raisonneur, le sarcastique, l’humoristique . . . des dissonances, des outrages à l’idée de beauté pure”—and now calls into service for his new poetic form. Even the recurrent crepuscular imagery of the first “chambre,” however, recalls “Notes nouvelles” in which the setting sun becomes the emblem of “decadent literature”—a nod to the accelerated decadence of “La Chambre double.” The prose poems expose the prose of poetry and the poetry of prose. If we now return to reread the first half of the piece in light of what we have seen in the second, it appears self-aware and selfironizing. The prosy intrusions are more jarring and vulgar, the slanginess of “mirettes” is all the more obvious after the low, blunt “hue donc bourrique” of the closing; the idea of a perfect art that is in fact no art appears an ironization of an overemphasized value placed on perfection and the ideal. Even the first “ideal” half itself now reads as the debunking of a myth. That the most perfect art is a blank wall or page appears obvious justification for laziness or pointed self-irony; the journal editor is unlikely to accept blank pages as exemplars of the most perfect poetry. In the context of the capitalist and journalistic intrusions of the second half, the opening of the first suggests a notice “à louer”—“DREAM ROOM: positively spiritual! done in shades of pink and blue. Working bath. Fully furnished: large, comfortable pieces newly upholstered—floral motif. Clean walls. Curtains and full complement of linens. Infinitely comfortable, etc.”52 This irony in turn reflects back on the verse “La Beauté,” emphasizing the verse’s own inherent ironic potential. A muse that inspires poets to silence rather than to song is of questionable value. As a commentary on neoclassical poetics, the poem can be quite funny, as we imagine poet after poet bruising themselves against the rigidity of the alexandrine. The value of the poets is further disparaged as their fascination with beauty is exposed as narcissism disguised, hypnotic because its mirror reflects back their own image beautified. The poem thus calls into question its own value (since it must have been written to a false muse by one of these narcissistic poets), which in turn calls to mind the inauthenticity of the speaker—who must be ventriloquized by one of the “dociles amants” she disparages. This irony is all in the poem to be read—the prose poem provides the tutorial in how to read it.53 Similarly, the prose variation of elements of “Hymne à la Beauté” accentuates the already strained rhetorical structure of that poem by compressing the questions spread out and elaborated in the verse into a breathless, pointless interrogation. Prosy, awkward



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moments in the verse (particularly line 4: “Et l’on peut pour cela te comparer au vin”) are echoed and thereby amplified in the prose version. The full self-irony entailed in spelling out the poetic process, rendering explicit the usually implicit grounds for figurative comparison, likewise comes to the fore.54 The prose poem provides a demonstration of the reading process required and then directs our gaze. The relationship that unfolds between the two halves provides a blueprint for a method of reading that redeems the verse poems for the transgressive aesthetic by damning them to reveal their own relationship with irony and temporality. Similarly, the prose poem brings out the poetic aspects—the figurative, the unstable, the transgressive aspects—of the critical prose writings themselves. As noted, the crepuscular imagery of the first “chambre” resonates with the opening image of “Notes nouvelles.” A more sweeping parallel may be drawn, however, between the juxtaposition of two women representing two modes of aesthetic orientation. The passage as a whole focuses our attention once again on the strong affinity between Baudelaire’s reading of Poe and the prose poem form: “Littérature de décadence! Paroles vides que nous entendons souvent tomber, avec la sonorité d’un baîllement emphatique, de la bouche de ces sphinx sans énigme qui veillent devant les portes saintes de l’Esthétique classique” (Literature of decadence! Empty words that we often hear falling with all the sonority of an emphatic yawn from the mouths of those sphinxes without riddles who guard the holy gates of Classical Aesthetics).55 As clearly as the prose poem falls into the category of the “decadent” literature he celebrates here, however, this passage of the essay falls into the category of the prose poem. As in “La Chambre double,” Des comparaisons grotesques s’agitent alors dans mon cerveau; il me semble que deux femmes me sont présentées: l’une, matrone rustique, répugnante de santé et de vertu, sans allure et sans regard, bref, ne devant rien qu’à la simple nature; l’autre, une de ces beautés qui dominent et oppriment le souvenir, unissant à son charme profond et originel tout l’éloquence de la toilette, maîtresse de sa démarche, consciente et reine d’elle-même. . . .56 Grotesque comparisons then begin to stir in my brain; it seems that I am presented with two women, one, a rustic matron, repulsive with health and virtue, with no style or air about her, in short, owing nothing except to nature, the other, one of these beauties who dominate and oppress the memory, uniting in her profound and original charm all the eloquence of dress, knowing exactly how to carry herself, regal and self-possessed. . . .



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The cast of characters strikes us by now as familiar. Here, “repugnant” health and virtue are cast aside, devalued by the magnetic “dominating” power of the beauty marked by dress and artifice— markers of fashion that can betray the trace of time. This is the same figure, however, that becomes “l’idole” in “La Chambre double,”— the intermediary figure between classicism and Romanticism whose spell is in turn violated by the advent of the real grit of the temporal with its kept mistresses, newspapers, calendars, and rent. But the right kind of art might in turn—as in “Hymne à La Beauté” or explicitly in “Peintre de lavie moderne”—indicate the nexus between temporal and ideal, eternal—establishing the next phase of the pattern. The model of the prose poem suggests the possibility of reading Baudelaire’s entire œuvre as an integrated performance of his transgressive concept of beauty. The prose poetry not only enacts transgression, perpetually generating strangeness by violating what has elsewhere been defined as pure, it demonstrates a reading and rereading process and applies this process to itself and to other texts. Baudelaire’s very inconsistencies and contradictions thus effectively stage a performance of the transgressive aesthetic he valorizes in the 1855 “Exposition” essay. He enacts this drama in three genres, and the movement among and between them is as important as the aesthetic stances of each one. The prose poems, his most explicit embodiment and enactment of his transgressive aesthetics, provide the blueprint for this reading; they are texts that in turn generate transgressive, violating readings of his other texts—violating his own prescriptions, demonstrating how “l’idéal” is “always already” defiling and defiled in verse as well as in prose. The full drama, however, requires that Baudelaire be alternately invested in both the rules he is drawing and the effects he achieves by their violation—violations practiced for mere shock value, without other justification or motivation, will not produce the desired effect: herein lies the importance of self-contradiction. He disparages cheap tricks and novelty that purports to come without cost. The delusions he exposes, the ideals he violates, are his own. This defilement, however, enlivens form and sharpens aesthetic experience. In “La Chambre double,” the first “chambre,” though lulling and beautiful, was a reenactment of past poems, a recycling of familiar images. The violations of “decorum” in the second half—the argot and the focus on terms for dirt and ugliness, even the articulation of despair at the end—import variety into the poetic lexicon and in so doing arrest, or rather shock, the audience. Far from being lulled, we are prodded and jabbed to attention, and this attention focuses on ruptures in



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language, in expected patterns. At the site of this penetration, then, Baudelaire’s poetics moves toward a new conception of aesthetics, one that relies—in forms where the medium is language—on the fragmenting and disruptive function of language for its effects on poem, poet, and reader.57 It is a penetration that begins violently and despotically and proceeds slowly and patiently (as he says, second by second). This performance is not under the control of an autocratic poet.58 The poet is certainly coercive, but he is also coerced. His position is variable, but not exactly enviable, recalling rather the verse poem “L’Héautontimorouménous”: Je suis la plaie et le couteau Je suis le soufflet et la joue! Je suis les membres et la roue, Et la victime et le bourreau!59



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“P R O S E C O M B A T ”: B AU D E L A I R E A N D TH E P R E S S

This is prose combat. —MC Solaar

Given his feelings about journalism, Baudelaire’s integration of

what he called this “disgusting apéritif” with the “cher poison” of poetry seems contradictory and perverse—that is to say, entirely in keeping with the self-violating ethos of the prose poem project.1 As I argued throughout the previous chapter, Baudelaire’s prose poems stage transgressions that reference and implicate all the moments, constituents, and participants in the textual process, from representation as such to that which is represented, from reader, to writer, to source. Eternal and temporal, verse and prose, high and low collide and interpenetrate referentially and stylistically. In staging these confrontations, Baudelaire frequently draws on the foreign and exotic, but he also incorporates the poetic world closest to home: passages in the prose poems that wax lyrically metaphoric or metaphysical often evoke his own verse. Such passages, in turn, set the stage for interruptions by the mundane, vulgar, and domestic, by commercial registers and argot as well as other languages, as in the English-language title to “Any Where Out of the World” or, as I have argued in terms of “La Chambre double,” other metrical systems. In such cases, the prose poems reflect back (or forward) on the verse in true “pendant” form, foregrounding the verse’s own ironic potential and exposing the quotidian origins of some of its headiest and most exotic imagery, as Johnson has argued of “La Chevelure” and “Un Hémisphère dans



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une chevelure.”2 Although such demythologizing doublets accentuate the difference between exotic myth and quotidian reality, other prose poems tend to collapse this distinction. Most texts, in fact, depart entirely from the theoretical and thematic constructs typical of verse poems such as “Le Voyage” and “La Chevelure.” Eschewing the metaphoric discourse of “le beau bizarre” with its foreign lands and wide prairies, which Baudelaire had likely never seen, many prose poems find their poetic “foreign turf,” the source of their formal, rhetorical, stylistic, and linguistic otherness, in the most Parisian and familiar of milieus. For this “domestic exotic,” they turn not only to the streets, as is immediately apparent thematically and lexically, but to Baudelaire’s actual experience in and around journalism. The connection is explicit in Baudelaire’s personal writings. In Fusées, he recasts the emblematic wilderness characteristic of the “beau bizarre” not as an exotic Eastern culture but as quotidian Paris, expanding on a Balzacian theme: Quoi de plus absurde que le Progrès, puisque l’homme, comme cela est prouvé par le fait journalier, est toujours semblable et égal à l’homme, c’est-à-dire toujoursà l’état sauvage. Qu’est-ce que les périls de la forêt et de la prairie auprès des chocs et conflits quotidiens de la civilisation?3 What is more absurd than Progress, since man, as each daily event proves, is always the likeness and equal of man, that is to say, always in a state of nature. What are the perils of the forest and the prairie compared to the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization?

This passage supplies the phrase rendered famous in Benjamin’s account of modern urban “shock,” but in context, we see that the “chocs” and “conflits” that Benjamin associates with urban street life actually emerge in this explicit form not via the street, per se but via “le fait journalier.” As “conflits quotidiens” return us to a state of nature, not only the street but its verbal analogue, the newspaper, becomes a new wilderness into which “l’homme du monde” may enter. Although Baudelaire’s conflation of the civilized, the quotidian, and the savage has a certain ironic and figurative flair, in one sense it was quite literal. Given the stringent historical limitations on French poetic lexicon, in a poetic context, “quotidian” language, in the double sense of everyday usage and in the more limited sense of the language of the “quotidien,” or daily newspaper, was the exotic. As consistently as the verse sets out to cross from familiar to strange and exotic, the prose poems interrogate—often aggressively—the boundary between this (poetically exotic) quotidian and the aesthetic. Furthermore, at the



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most literal level, a number of prose poems cross that boundary in a very material way, appearing in print first on the pages of the popular daily La Presse. Thus the press not only provides material for the prose poems in the sense of linguistic and thematic “stuff,” but also their earliest material manifestation. Tied to journalism from the moment of their publication or, as I argue, from their very inception and before, the prose poems’ journalistic tone has also figured in their reception history, although generally in passing only.4 Journalism’s role was long understood in terms of Baudelaire’s relationship to “argot” in general, as in Rosemary Lloyd’s account of “Baudelaire’s conception of commonplace and cliché”: “popular speech provides the base materials the poet transmutes into art. However paradoxical it might seem, . . . the worn leavings of popular speech can be exploited as sources of inspiration.”5 Argot is material, and Baudelaire’s verbal art revivifies the commonplace through transposition and transformation. Such an understanding of journalism’s role in the prose poems is in line with a traditional schema of the relationship of material to form: the press provides material, which the form at once transforms and transcends. Arguing from a different perspective, Walter Benjamin also asserts that Baudelaire rises out of the commercialism of journalism and transcends the commodification inherent in journalism’s rise to power. Baudelaire’s anxieties about the commodification of poetry also form part of his argument, but nonetheless, Benjamin—his Marxist concerns with the economic conditions governing literary production and distribution notwithstanding—views Baudelaire’s formal transformations as a means of transcendence. Some of Baudelaire’s best-known comments on journalism suggest he might characterize his own work in a similar way, or at least concur that a relationship with journalism is something one would want to transcend. He sees journalism as violent, even disgusting: Il est impossible de parcourir une gazette quelconque, de n’importe quel jour ou quel mois ou quelle année, sans y trouver à chaque ligne les signes de la perversité humaine la plus épouvantable, en même temps que les vanteries les plus surprenantes de probité, de bonté, de charité, et les affirmations les plus effrontées relatives au progrès et à la civilisation. Tout journal, de la première ligne à la dernière, n’est qu’un tissu d’horreurs. . . . Et c’est de ce dégoutant apéritif que l’homme civilisé accompagne son repas de chaque matin. Je ne comprends pas qu’une main pure puisse toucher un journal sans une convulsion de dégoût.6



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Every newspaper is a tissue of horrors from the first line to the last. And it is this disgusting apéritif that the civilized man takes with his breakfast every morning. I don’t know how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.

Explicit depictions of violence and perversity, however, need not necessarily pose a problem for the author of poems like “Une Charogne” and “Une Martyre.” Nonetheless, journalism causes a “pure hand” to convulse with disgust. If, as poetic precedent suggests, graphic depictions of violence are not sufficient grounds for this disgust, other factors must account for it. One of Baudelaire’s chief complaints about the press, judging by this passage, is that it normalizes and routinizes human violence, placing “crimes des nations” on an equal footing with “impudicités,” leveling differences of kind and scale and incorporating them into a kind of intoxicating morning beverage that serves “universal atrocity” in a form as domestic and easy to swallow as an “apéritif.” Another difficulty, however, arises from the newspaper layout itself, which narrows space between lines and “signs,” thus effacing any kind of spatial and temporal distance between the best humanity has to offer and its worst “perversities.” These complaints echo the earlier comments that see the leveling equality of the quotidian as a return to a state of nature (and one that corresponds more closely to Hobbes’ vision than that of Baudelaire’s “Jean-Jacques”). This kind of structural juxtaposition, however, would create precisely the kind of textual “chocs et conflits” that most typify the prose poems. The image of the “pure hand” brings the passage into even closer dialogue with the self-violating ethos of the prose poem. Since “hand” is a metonym for poetry’s traditional means of production (the process of handwriting) and its material manifestation (the handwriting itself), a journalistically produced convulsion might have a deforming effect on the “pure hand” that could produce a “pure poetry.” Baudelaire himself subscribed (at least at times) to the separation of form and content: “la forme est indépendante de la matière, et ce ne sont pas les molécules qui constituent la forme.”7 (form is independent of matter, and molecules do not constitute form.)8 As I argue in the previous chapter, however, Baudelaire’s stated positions often function as boundaries for prose poems to violate, and indeed, the prose poems’



It is impossible to peruse any gazette, whatever the day or month or year, without finding the most horrifying signs of human perversity in every line, and at the same time, the most improbable boasts of probity, goodness, charity, and all the most brazen affirmations of progress and civilization.

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relationship to journalism challenges precisely that separation between form and materiality Baudelaire seems to insist on above. That is, not only does the newspaper provide material (content, subject matter) and materiality (publication) to the prose poem, it also underlies its form. Recent studies have extensively challenged critical truisms about the prose poems’ lack of literary precedent. Following on from an argument first put forth by Graham Robb and extended more recently by Silvia Disegni, however, I want to consider journalism as a literary and theoretical precedent for Baudelaire—one he turned to not in spite of but because of his disgust.9 In the course of this investigation, I will first isolate the structures and textual relationships and effects in which I most see journalism’s convulsive “hand,” and then examine Baudelaire’s own account of the journalistic origins of the prose poem as put forth in his “Dedication” to the editor of the daily La Presse. Against this Baudelairean backdrop, then, I delve into the world of journalism itself and, quite literally following in Robb’s footsteps, or rather, footnotes, first explore the territory we know Baudelaire to have occupied (the satiric Corsaire-Satan) and, finally, the even more “material” territory of a tailoring trade journal.

THE D Y NA MICS OF C ONTE X TURE THE S OUP OF THE R E A L

A ND

De la nécessité de battre les femmes. —Baudelaire

Benjamin’s discussions of Baudelaire and journalism evoke the vertical model of transcendence; certainly issues of horizontality and verticality, equality, and contiguity occupy the prose poems consistently and on a variety of levels, although these structures are by no means stable. Structuralism—the theoretical approach most concerned with these issues—devoted considerable attention to Baudelaire and may owe more to him than an occasion to practice its trade. Whatever influence may be traceable, however, his work seems almost designed to be plotted along vertical and horizontal axes—and so it was, of course, in Barbara Johnson’s seminal study. I argue in the subsequent chapter for the importance of horizontal, transnational border crossings, but it is clear that most of the prose poems’ stylistic and representational interruptions at least seem to occur along a vertical axis, staging and restaging the deflation and degradation of the poetic. The texts clearly exploit this sense of verticality for dramatic effect.



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As they represent the creation of new aesthetic effect by means of a violent, literalized fall—the bad glazier’s shattering descent or the child model’s hanging suicide in “La Corde”—in practice, the prose poems also reverse the trajectory of transcendence to a classical aesthetic of harmony and beauty by violating these ideals at the textual level. Neoclassical ideals are violated textually, that is, in tandem with the violation the literalized image depicts, as “La Corde” turns on the rhetoric as well as the image of the distended flesh of the urchin’s swollen neck. The hierarchy of literary genre and lexicon parallels that of social class and aligns with the physical verticality the text invokes. The tiny text “La Soupe et les nuages” condenses and perfects this vertical paradigm. As in “La Chambre double,” the introduction of the quotidian both deflates the elevated musings of the visionary and exposes the delusional nature of the lyric poet’s dream of transcendence: Ma petite folle bien-aimée me donnait à dîner, et par la fenêtre ouverte de la salle à manger je contemplais les mouvantes architectures que Dieu fait avec les vapeurs, les merveilleuses constructions de l’impalpable. Et je me disais, à travers ma contemplation: “- Toutes ces fantasmagories sont presque aussi belles que les yeux de ma belle bien-aimée, la petite folle monstrueuse aux yeux verts.” Et tout à coup je reçus un violent coup de poing dans le dos, et j’entendis une voix rauque et charmante, une voix hystérique et comme enrouée par l’eau-de-vie, la voix de ma chère petite bien-aimée, qui disait: “—Allez-vous bientôt manger votre soupe, s . . . b . . . de marchand de nuages.”10 My mad little beloved was serving me dinner, and through the open dining room window, I was contemplating the moving architecture God renders from vapor, those marvelous constructions of the impalpable. And I said to myself, in the midst of this contemplation, “All these phantasmagories are almost as beautiful as the eyes of my beautiful mistress, that mad little green-eyed monster.” Then all of a sudden I received a violent punch in the back, and I heard a raucous and charming voice, a hysterical voice, as if hoarse with brandy, the voice of my dear little beloved, saying, “Hurry up and eat your soup, you d____ b____ of a cloud merchant!”

The double structure—here reduced to only two brief paragraphs— parallels the longer “Chambre double.” In both, furthermore, the figure of the woman appears both as the ideal and the means of its puncture.11 Here again, we find the poet in the midst of his musings



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on “les merveilleuses constructions de l’impalpable” and the equivalence he draws between “ces fantasmagories” and “les yeux de [sa] belle bien-aimée.” The quotidian source of his fantasies, however, violently interrupts his reverie, as “tout à coup” he receives “un violent coup de poing dans le dos”—the voice of the real manifestation of his “merveilleuses constructions.”12 The piece turns on the aspect of a woman who functions both as aestheticized, poeticized ideal, and as literalizing, denigrating force: the former in the imagination of the poet, the latter in her actual aspect—she serves (a) as muse and (b) the soup, to put it zeugmatically. In this instance, the blow is specifically linguistic—the manuscript gives “sacré bougre” (“damn bugger”), a phrase apparently too vulgar even for the “vulgar press”—although the “bientôt” indicates the continued importance of the temporal in the transgressive structure. Jan Mukařovský’s theory of lexical semantics—in keeping with a school of thought that defines poetic language in terms of violation—deals precisely with such phrasal effects: “the semantic aspect of a word is not given only by the lexical sphere from which the word comes but also by its confrontation with the other words beside which it appears in the text.” Mukařovský’s confrontational rhetoric is suited to a discussion of Baudelaire—and indeed, he found Baudelaire similarly suited to his semantic theory, almost directly thereafter citing a projected foreword to Fleurs du mal: “poetry is connected to the arts of painting, cooking, and cosmetics by its ability to express any feeling of sweetness or bitterness, of bliss or horror, by linking a certain noun to a certain adjective, either analogous or contrary.”13 Mukařovský relates this “expressive” “linking” to what he calls “mirroring” of meaning, to which he opposes the “dynamics” of contexture because it occurs in “the smallest possible textual span” as opposed to a larger context—“marchand de nuages” being the kind of double syntactic “phrase-word” he has in mind. What Mukařovský calls the “dynamics of contexture,” however, in Baudelaire ricochets back from the phraseword to recolor the reader’s experience of the poem that precedes it. The differential in this case works in one direction only: the voice of the “real” may plunge the clouds into the soup, but there is no hint (thankfully) of the soup being transformed into clouds. The prior metaphoric equivalence between the woman’s eyes and the clouds is similarly sundered by her actual appearance, and there is no turning back. The juxtaposition with the quotidian not only sullies the image of the clouds but also exposes their apparent earlier transcendence as fraud. In other words, just as the “phrase-word” collapses the literal and quotidian with the transcendent, it exposes the poet as having



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done the same through his activities as a professional poet: for what is a poet published and paid for his lyrics but a cloud merchant? This violent clash of registers and their attendant worldviews indeed creates the signature drama of the prose poem, whose blow in turn exposes the now commercialized nature of poetic work—in a piece destined to be sold to the popular press. Poetry, like the woman who inspires, defiles, and exposes it, is bifurcated: ideal only so long as it remains unwritten in the mind of the poet, and sullied the moment it enters the actual—the moment it takes material form. In abstract terms, as the process of becoming material, writing may “always already” be an act of falling, a marking of perfection (the blank page) whose attempts at transcendence only mystify and occult this violence, an idea simultaneously suggested and ironized in “La Chambre double.”14 Can it, then, be “more fallen” by taking material form in the press, rather than flowing onto paper directly from and in a “pure hand” that the same press would cause to convulse? What if it can, if its form’s origin and destination are also its material? What is the aesthetic status of a form destroyed? The following excerpts from Baudelaire’s journal consider this question from different perspectives: De la nécessité de battre les femmes. On peut châtier ce que l’on aime. Ainsi les enfants. Mais cela implique la douleur de mépriser ce que l’on aime.15 Of the necessity of beating women. One can punish what one loves. As with children. But this brings with it the pain of despising what one loves.

The next two appear separated by a line that at once suggests a break and underscores the connection between them: Toute forme créée, même par l’homme, est immortelle. Car la forme est indépendante de la matière, et ce ne sont pas les molécules qui constituent la forme. _______________ Anecdotes relatives à Émile Douay et à Constantin Guys, détruisant ou plutôt croyant détruire leurs oeuvres.16 Every form created, even by Man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter; molecules do not constitute form. _______________ Anecdotes about Émile Douay and Constantin Guys destroying, or rather, believing that they are destroying their work.



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Juxtaposing these passages suggests a parallel between women, specifically, violence against women, and the relationship between materiality and form. Indeed, this is a parallel both prose and verse poems explore, although the alignment of terms is subject to change. Here, the juxtaposed passages suggest that if “woman” is “material,” then “she” is not related to the form based on her, or perhaps based on her abuse, that the poet creates. The Pléiade edition refers readers to “Une Martyre,” the verse poem that depicts a woman’s corpse separated from its head, the ultimate allegory of the female body as commodified material object. The final strophe, however, ends with an emphasis on her disembodied “forme immortelle” haunting her lover/murderer/defiler: but form cannot die (small comfort, one might think, to the mutilated woman) and is therefore distinct from matter. “La Soupe et les nuages,” however, plunges its clouds into the soup of the real, where “the real” may be understood not only as the materiality of the soup, but also as the general frame of reference for the forces of sexuality and capitalism that the woman and her speech (“marchand de nuages”) unite. Women and commerce are also associated elsewhere in Baudelaire’s writings, most obviously in the image of the prostitute, but in other, more subtle ways as well: if “le commerce est naturel, donc il est infâme” (“commerce is natural, and therefore vile”) then “la femme,” also, “est naturelle, c’est-à-dire abominable” (“is natural, that is to say, abominable”).17 If to find commerce “natural” seems somewhat unnatural, it is nonetheless consistent with Baudelaire’s vision of the “quotidian state of nature” civilization has wrought. For Baudelaire, furthermore, the “natural” is the nonformal, and therefore the unartistic, as the allegory of the “rustic matron” and the elegant, decadent courtesan from “Notes nouvelle sur Edgar Poe” establishes. Woman and commerce, then, are not only interchangeable (allowing for the substitution property of parallel rhetorical devices) but inimical to art. If, however, as Debarati Sanyal argues, “woman” may function as a material body, a substance to be alchemically transformed by the creative process, then she is also often the means by which that alchemical transformation is interrupted or reversed.18 If “woman” is matter to be transformed by form, a common attitude throughout the era, in “La Soupe et les nuages,” at least, “she” is also seen resisting this transformation and enacting one of her own, albeit in a different direction. In the context of the violence the prose poems seem to heap on poetry itself, however, the passages suggest an equivalence between violence against women and violence against poetry—or, against form. The trail from battering a woman to battering a poem



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passes through love, necessity and mistrust, then to denial, then to insistence. As Sanyal also argues, “woman” functions as “a figure of poetry itself.”19 If that is the case in “La Soupe et les nuages,” then she appears to function as the figure of a prose poem, a textual process that at once relies on and destroys traditional poetry. Her material, grating, vulgar interruption is the means by which the new, more materially engaged form—the prose poem itself—is created, and “her” language—“marchand de nuages”—neatly encapsulates both the thematic and the rhetorical drama of the prose poem project. The woman’s vulgar materiality generates not just material but a model and a thematic key for the prose poem form. The Pléiade note to the journal passage also editorializes that the second paragraph “malgré le filet, se rattache étroitement au paragraphe précédent: la forme est indestructible” (closely adheres to the preceding paragraph despite the dash: form is indestructable). The causal colon with which this comment links the paragraph about artists destroying their work to the passage about immortal form, however, is interpretive. The connection is close, but its nature is open to other interpretations. The cluster seems to culminate in the image of Constantin Guys, Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life,” destroying his work; Guys’ work is typical not of the temporally transcendent classical aesthetic, however, but of the “time-stamped” modern that is mutable, marked, explicitly not transcendent. Intriguingly, the subsequent journal entry consists of the indictment of journalism and violence, reproduced above, the one that ends: “Je ne comprends pas qu’une main pure puisse toucher un journal sans une convulsion de dégoût.” The “dynamics of contexture” put this passage in play with the concepts of “material” and “form”; “woman” and “violence” and, crucially, with the problem of artists destroying their own work. If journalism would cause a “main pure” (pure hand) to convulse in disgust, what would it do to a “poésie pure” of the kind that transforms the material offered by a decapitated corpse into a poetic object of beauty, into an “immortal form”? “La Soupe et les nuages” supplies us with a literal answer: if journalism transforms the poet into a “sacré bougre de marchand de nuages” ironically, it also edits the phrase, making it more reader-friendly, intervening not only at the moment of inspiration but at publication as well. Prose poetry in bed with journalism cannot remain “pure” even in its own explicit vulgarity—and it was the press, after all, that leveled the charges leading to Baudelaire’s obscenity trial and the subsequent censorship of explicit poems from Les Fleurs du mal.



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D EDIC ATION

TO

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L A P RESSE

Subtil et versatile, le reptile tranquille entre dans le rythme comme on entre dans une femme facile.

To characterize Baudelaire’s relation to his journalistic past as ambivalent is to succumb to the kind of understatement Baudelaire’s own perpetual hyperbole on the subject of the press seems to compel. Nonetheless, by his own ironic account in his “Dédicace” to Arsène Houssaye, the prose poems are born of the interpenetration of the poetic and the journalistic. “The press”—both in general terms and with particular reference to the newspaper La Presse, of which Houssaye was editor—is inscribed in the mythic origin-story Baudelaire included with his first publication of the texts, in a passage that seems almost to squirm in its contradictory impulses to insult and praise, acknowledge and deny debt. Sonya Stephens argues that the dedication itself—much like the texts it introduces—operates “between forms of duplicity,” marshalling readerly expectations of genre and even punctuation to construct multiply edged ironies. Devices like italics and rhetorical questions signal indirect communications for which the speaker seems to rely on shared background knowledge with his readers. However, Stephens suggests, the overall effect “relies on irony which, like the rhetorical questions which punctuate it, is a form of duplicity” that results in a “mismatch.”20 The piece seems to establish a common ground, in other words, even as it pulls the rug out from under us. “Dédicace” begins with the image of a snake without head or tail, or a snake in which all parts are equally head and tail: “Mon cher ami, je vous envoi un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire, sans injustice, qu’il n’a ni queue ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire, y est à la fois tête et queue, alternativement et réciproquement”21 (My dear friend, I’m sending you a little work of which one couldn’t say without injustice that it has neither head nor tail, for on the contrary, it is all head and tail at once, alternately and reciprocally). Each one of the parts, however, should be able to stand alone, and in the hopes that some, at least, will be enough to please and amuse the editor, Baudelaire “dares” to dedicate “le serpent tout entier.” The exemplary literary symbol, the snake connotes sin, specifically the temptation toward it, the temptation to material and carnal knowledge that leads to a fall. Here (perhaps as always) the snake is language; like language,



—MC Solaar

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the snake seduces with the promise of knowledge and provides the initial link of what some millennia later will be termed the “sexualtextual nexus.”22 Poetry and language may “always already” be linked to the seduction toward the fall from Edenic unity to materiality and difference, but this symbolic realm is nonetheless distinct from the kind of financial exchange that marks sexuality and poetics in the prose poems. The snake (the poems) have fallen into the language of the press—just as, quite literally, they are falling into La Presse, as the letter sends them off for publication. The image functions simultaneously as self-reflexive formal commentary, as metatextual notation of poetry’s fall from the symbolic to the literal and material, as reflexive remark on the duplicity of the letter that both mocks and flatters Houssaye, and as a description of the fate of the actual poems, due to be published in accordance with the spatial and monetary demands of the newspaper, literally cut along columns and interspliced with advertisements, political commentary, and the like. Nathaniel Wing cuts the snake as follows: The metaphor of the segmented serpent inscribes the figures here in what might be called a rhetoric of disruption, which operates at the same time a forceful disruption of rhetoric. The energy of that process is suggested by the violent language of this passage, which characterizes composition, editing and reading as acts of cutting, interrupting and displacing fragments.23

Just as market diction infects the realm of pure poetry in “La Chambre double,” rendering in retrospect what had seemed pure elegy a falsely elevated advertisement for a squalid rental, here the acts of poetic composition and the consumption and production of newspapers are presented as identical—by a strangely self-violating snake. Here, Eden’s snake dissects itself for our enjoyment, specifically for our convenience and the convenience of all: “Considérez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodités cette combinaison nous offre à tous, à vous, à moi et au lecteur.” (Consider, I beg you, what admirable convenience this combination offers to everyone, to you, to me, and to the reader.) What combination? Of head and tail, of higher and lower, divine and infernal, beginning and end—the familiar poles of “Idéal” and “Spleen” now cut up together, alternating, to be sure, but reciprocally, entering each other and interpenetrating each other “à la fois.” In this way, the texts become commodities, easily parceled, packaged, sold. A draft of the letter found in Baudelaire’s Carnet is more explicit, cut more bluntly and more cutting: “Sans queue ni tête. Tout queue et



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tête. Commode pour moi. Commode pour vous. Commode pour le Lecteur.”24 (Without tail or head. All tail and head. Convenient for me. Convenient for you. Convenient for the Reader.) This deeply ironic and covertly conflicted letter also explicitly evokes the interpenetration of the poetic with the journalistic as it at once credits and implicates the editor and would-be poet, citing in very backhanded praise Houssaye’s own “vitrier”—a poem likewise first published in a journalistic venue—as source for Baudelaire’s “bad” counterpart. As Jacques Derrida, among others, has noted, this dedication plays a very insidious role, difficult to pin down even as to whether or not it should be included in the book of poems it dedicates; it raises the question even of the “slice” [tranche] and of “cutting” [trancher]. It does so by waving the figure of the Serpent—the book being offered is a serpent—of a serpent in pieces, of a long elusive, segmented animal the “whole” of which [“tout entier”] Baudelaire says he wants to dedicate to his friend. What is one doing when one dedicates a serpent—a whole serpent or in segments?25

The snake eating its own tail signifies “circulation” of a sort, a line of prose devours itself to become, if “cut,” also, circling, endless. The circle formed by the linear snake is also necessarily hollow, just as it is without head or tail, robbed of these contextualizing, anchoring forms or substance, taking structure only from what is “commode.” These kinds of decontextualizing, cutting, and circulating processes are also aligned with the very processes of newspaper publication and production that Walter Benjamin will associate with the transformation of the French press, as I discuss below. In this originary myth, then, the prose poem connects the religious and biblical origin of the fall, the most recognizable and overdetermined of literary symbols, with the material demands and circumstances of the most “fallen” of literary venues. On this vertical trajectory, however, it superimposes the more lateral and horizontal but no less violent action of the cut. The violent leveling potential of the journalistic cut recalls the journal passage that sees the “chocs et conflits quotidiens” as more perilous than untamed wilds abroad. The source of the peril is, again, that “l’homme, comme cela est prouvé par le fait journalier, est toujours semblable et égal à l’homme.” The functions of the market, on the one hand, and the structure of the journalistic page, on the other, level distinctions, and Baudelaire is fully aware of this power: poetry and journalism are both wares to be bought, and in this way, appear on a



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level field. A poem that appears in a newspaper, furthermore, is laterally, literally, materially juxtaposed with advertisements, news items, and feuilletons, subject to the material assertion of equality through juxtaposition on a single broadsheet. Historical and cultural distance renders the specifics of this complex generic dynamic difficult to pin down, particularly if we wish to move beyond the exchange and transposition of “journalistic” lexical items into more poetic contexts— and vice versa—to examine broader structural, formal, and stylistic trends. For while we can still recognize rhetorical features common to nineteenth-century journalism that have survived or evolved, we naturally no longer can claim real familiarity with Baudelaire’s journalistic quotidian, and some of its elements are surprising.

THE R ISE

OF THE

F EUILLETON

Referencing the “cocktail” provided by La Presse’s inclusion of poetry, Silvia Disegni argues that “this contiguity favors a synchronic reading of the page where the marvelous contaminates fact”—because two kinds of texts emerge from the same reality and include the same set of urban characters and scenes. However, the paraphrastic juxtaposition of one sentence to the other sets up comparisons that accentuate the dissonance between the two modes.26 These effects pave the way for the shock-effect of the prose poem, but the editorial policy that made them possible paves the way in a more literal sense, transforming the daily newspaper into a market for literary texts. The poetic shift marked by Baudelaire’s turn to prose poetry follows close on the heels of such major changes in the production and consumption of French print culture. Benjamin offers an early, influential account of these changes and their impact, although he does not connect these discussions with the prose poems in any way and, indeed, argues for Baudelaire’s transcendence of this milieu rather than for its continued influence. In characterizing this changing milieu—a characterization that continues to provide the only introduction to this aspect of Baudelaire’s experience that most readers of the past half century are likely to have had—Benjamin emphasizes the importance of the shift in journalistic and literary practice, which he dates from the end of the 1830s and locates primarily in the rise of La Presse, the newspaper in which the majority of Baudelaire’s prose poems published during his lifetime were to appear. According to Benjamin, the rise of the daily newspaper bears the greatest responsibility for this change, as the pressure to fill pages of newspaper text on a daily basis hastened and intensified the commodification of literary authorship. Benjamin credits the emergence of a new form—the feuilleton—with the influx



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of bellettristic material into the dailies, an influx that was accompanied by the rise of advertising, which increased circulation and availability by reducing the price of subscription. The feuilleton slot also provided a forum for serialized novels, thus increasing the likelihood that content with claims to literary status would appear juxtaposed with short news items and advertisements. Benjamin describes several distinguishing features of this new literary landscape, focusing particular attention on Houssaye’s paper: “. . . La Presse played a decisive part in this rise. It brought about three important innovations: a lower subscription price of forty francs, advertisements, and the serial novel.” Benjamin further stresses the role of “short, abrupt news items” that “could be employed commercially” by publishers, stockholders, and others in ways that might undercut, even blatantly contradict, the newspaper’s more substantial editorial content, such as literary reviews and extended news coverage.27 These small items also provided visual and formal variety—commercially valuable novelty— with little extra effort or cost: These informative items required little space. They, and not the political editorials or the serialized novels, enabled a newspaper to have a different look every day—an appearance that was cleverly varied when the pages were made up. . . . These items had to be constantly replenished. City gossip, theatrical intrigures, and “things worth knowing” were their most popular sources. Their cheap elegance, a quality that became so characteristic of the feuilleton section, was in evidence from the beginning.

These “short, abrupt items” appear in the context of each other rather than a richer, more complete discourse about their origins, cut into “bite-size” pieces, “representational currencies whose origins are masked, erased, or forgotten” and cut into each other for purposes of layout, convenience, pace, and novelty. Benjamin leaves little doubt about what value he places on these “items.” He launches into his discussion of the periodical press from an account of Baudelaire’s “abrupt break with l’art pour l’art” in an 1851 essay proclaiming that “henceforth art was inseparable from both morality and utility.” Baudelaire adopts this attitude, as Benjamin sees it, “to announce the latitude which was at his disposal as a man of letters,” marking him “ahead of the writers of his time” and making clear “in what respects [Baudelaire] was above the literary activity which surrounded him.”28 With no further transition, Benjamin enters into his extensive exploration of Baudelaire’s journalistic milieu, describing the shift to newspaper dailies and their effects on the commodification of marketable, excerptable authors and literary texts. The conclusion that Baudelaire



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is “above” the literary activity that surrounds him serves as a kind of fulcrum that connects two kinds of transcendence: transcendence both of the socialist literary values of the revolutionary 1840s and of the commercial values represented by the new journalistic trends. It is his discussion of the latter, naturally, which leads Benjamin to assert that it is “virtually impossible to write a history of information separately from a history of the corruption of the press.”29 Baudelaire’s poetry, in this formulation, engages but transcends the “corruption” “which surrounded him”—much as (although Benjamin does not make this connection) the “forme immortelle” of the woman in “Une Martyre” transcends her decapitated and defiled body. Benjamin posits the French periodical press as the ground against which readers may gauge Baudelaire’s transcendence. Baudelaire no doubt would recognize and embrace such a characterization—it is one he applied himself to his work in Fleurs du mal, claiming he had taken the mud of the streets and turned it into gold. Baudelaire’s prose poetry owes more to journalism, however, than such an alchemical formula would allow.

P ROSE C OMBAT : I N

THE

E DITORI A L TRENCHES

Combien ça fait-il de lignes, vos idées? —Henri Murger

The journalistic world of Paris at mid-century might readily have suggested a wilderness in becoming, chaotic and fast transforming. It is crucial to recognize that the journalism Baudelaire incorporates in forming his hybrid prose poetry is itself intensely heterogeneous. Journalism during this era seems to share with Baudelaire a tremendous anxiety about language and its functions, particularly in relation to high culture on the one hand and commerce on the other; it also produces analogous and at times markedly similar effects. Journals, newspapers, and reviews were numerous and multiform, fiercely staking out and contesting literary or journalistic territory and anxious for their position and that of their subscribers vis-à-vis the highculture realm of letters. Trade journals themselves, as well as journals with more avowed literary pretensions, invoked high cultural references in service of their commercial aims, thus frequently—and with varying degrees of intention and awareness—producing the kinds of clashes between linguistic codes (verbal “chocs et conflits”) that were to become the hallmark of Baudelaire’s prose poems. The motivations of such clashes are by no means uniform; some seem utterly naive



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and unintentional, while others seem likely to have been constructed ironically by literary writers who resented the commercialism of the papers they felt themselves reduced to writing for. Indeed, the content of any number of trade publications was supplied by struggling “littérateurs” such as the young Baudelaire and his companions. Thus it is often difficult to determine whether the editors are in earnest or are making fun at their readers’ expense. Editors and contributors changed frequently and most often used pseudonyms or wrote anonymously, further contributing to the mix of styles and the difficulty of determining rhetorical mode and tone—whether straightforward or ironic, intentionally or naively funny. L’Innovateur, for example, the portentously named journal of cobbling and bootmaking, sought contributions from Baudelaire himself: he seems to have promised (and perhaps was even paid for) several articles (the journal advertises them as forthcoming), but never delivered—the angry editor that looms spectrally over “La Chambre double” was a literal and frequent enough occurrence in the poet’s life. That a journal of bootmaking named “L’Innovateur” commissioned articles on aesthetics by Baudelaire just as he is changing the course of French poetics and establishing key tenets of modernist aesthetics is one of the nicer ironies this era in journalism produces. In a further turn of this irony, however, the very pages of this journal effect verbal and rhetorical deformations quite similar to those Baudelaire would enact in the prose poems. In the editorial section of L’Innovateur, a war of words with a rival journal over the potential for establishing a “Halle” (in Les Halles, the central Parisian covered marketplace) devoted to cobbling could produce arresting results: Plusieurs de nos abonnés nous ont écrit pour nous demander quelles sont les conditions à remplir afin de devenir associés à la halle et l’époque à laquelle cette halle serait en mesure d’ouvrir ses portes à la cordonnerie: “Hâtez-vous lentement, et sans perdre courage,” a dit Boileau qui n’était pas un sot.”30 A number of our subscribers have written to ask about the requirements for becoming associated with the market and to inquire when the “halle” would be opening its doors to shoemaking : “Hurry up slowly, without losing courage,” said Boileau, who was no idiot.

The passage dates from the same period Baudelaire was named by L’Innovateur as a future contributor, and is signed by the same editor. We could imagine that the enlistment of Boileau in support of a cobbler’s hall of commerce, in a rhetoric that lionizes the erstwhile



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champion of linguistic purity as being “pas un sot,” might have aided Baudelaire in his apparent decision not to follow through with his contract, but the juxtaposition of reference to register is so broad that it seems possible the editor was having his own joke at the expense of his imagined naive bootmaking readership. Nonetheless, the violence of the juxtaposition resembles the kind of linguistic blow administered frequently by the quotidian to the dreamy poetic personae of the prose poems—as by the earthbound mistress in “La Soupe et les nuages.”

B AUDEL A IRE

AT

L E C ORSA IRE -S ATA N

Il y venait de perdre les illusions de sa première virginité littéraire violée; toute sa douceur se tournait en fiel; il se trouvait merveilleusement propre au métier de journaliste. C’est quand les honnêtes femmes viennent d’être trompées que les entremetteuses ont beau jeu. —La Silhouette 31

The above passage from L’Innovateur dates from the period during which many of the prose poems were written, but the 1840s is the era most relevant to Baudelaire’s experience with journalism, since he himself was most directly involved at that time. This era, as Benjamin argues, was also marked by a transformation of the Parisian presses from a more discretely stratified separation of literary periodical and daily newspaper to forms that offered more potential for hybridization. Thus the changing form of newspapers staged the kinds of “chocs” and “conflits” Baudelaire remarked upon in his journals and which appear to have been so influential in his thinking about the prose poem as well as in shaping Benjamin’s account of Baudelaire’s modernity. Baudelaire, however, was by no means alone in having noticed this new state of affairs, even specifically with regard to the rhetorical interruptions and odd juxtapositions of register increasingly characteristic of journalistic style. A broad range of journals—dailies, periodicals, and trade journals—evince a marked concern for language and tremendous anxiety about their own status with relation to it, as evident from their selfreflexive commentary and nervous mocking of their peers and rivals. Baudelaire’s initiation into journalism, and thus into the anxieties of those who thought of themselves as high-culture literary men but who nonetheless wrote for payment from the pockets of those whom they despised, took place at the markedly hybridized satirical and literary journal Le Corsaire-Satan. This publication had avowedly literary aspirations, and its editor in chief believed himself to



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be harboring the literature of the future, a belief well-founded, as it turned out, since Baudelaire was a contributor (as far back as 1841, but most actively in 1845–1846).32 The journal was highly sensitive to language, taking upon itself the role of policing other publications, pointing out perceived violations of style and castigating their perpetrators. The violations of stylistic norms expected of particular publications could cut both ways: “descents” into vulgarity on the part of more literary journals and misplaced or mismanaged references to high culture alike attracted the Corsaire-Satan’s venom: Miracle! Le Constitutionnel marche! Il fait des progrès littéraires mais quelles enjambées bon Dieu! Dans son numéro d’avant-hier, on lit cette ligne que nous citons textuellement: “Cache ta vie et répands ton esprit,” a dit le Livre-Saint. Nous prions le Constitutionnel de nous dire à quel page de l’Ancien ou du Nouveau testament se trouve ce passage. Il est probable que le C. sait aussi bien que nous que ce n’est point un verset de la Bible qu’il a cité mais un vers de Victor Hugo, dans les Rayons et les ombres . . . Seulement, il est remarquable que le C. appèle un ouvrage de Victor Hugo “Le Livre Saint.”33 It’s a miracle ! The Constitutional makes strides [marche]! It is making literary progress, and Good God ! with what leaps! In the day before yesterday’s issue, we came across this line, which we cite in full : “Hide your life and spread your spirit,” as the Holy Scriptures say. We beg of the Constitutional to tell us on what page of the Old or New Testament this passage is to be found. It is likely that the C. knows as well as we do that it is no Bible verse that it has quoted but rather a poem by Victor Hugo in Sunbeams and Shadows. . . . only, it is remarkable that the Constitutional calls a work of Victor Hugo’s “Holy Scripture.”

The punning on “constitutionnel,” “marcher,” “progrès,” and even “enjambées” reflects a much broader and more heavy-handed but analogous sensitivity to the wickedly duplicitous potential of language that so frequently drives the prose poems. The whole error of attribution is simply an elaborate occasion for a jab at Victor Hugo (also not incompatible with a Baudelairean sensibility) made possible by—essentially—a confusion of register. The Corsaire-Satan was itself a hybrid publication, the uneasy marriage of two rival journals of very different styles that came together under the direction of Lepoitevin Saint-Alme. Saint-Alme, friend and sometime collaborator of Balzac, was simultaneously beloved and hated by his favorite young contributors, to whom he affectionately and paternalistically referred as his “petits crétins”



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but in whose potential he had ultimate faith.34 Perhaps this faith, perhaps editorial laziness, or simply the tight schedule of getting to press, guaranteed that the clash of codes and styles the publication lampoons above and elsewhere was also a hallmark of its own pages. Nor, for that matter, was the Corsaire immune to the venom of its rivals. A long satire of life in its editorial offices appeared in the rival Silhouette, a satire so detailed it must certainly have been an “inside job,” authored most likely by one of the “petits crétins” themselves: . . . comment bien rendre la physionomie d’une feuille qui n’en a pas? Aujourd’hui carliste, demain républicain, après-demain phalanstérien, sincère quelquefois, le Corsaire-Satan semble, ainsi que le vieux Protée, prendre, en politique comme en littérature, tous les aspects, toutes les formes. Ici une page éblouissante de poésie, de fantaisie, là une tartine de bas étage; ici la jeunesse, l’enthousiasme, la foi, là la décrépitude; . . . Le Corsaire-Satan ressemble à ces arbres frappés par la foudre, dont un côté est calciné, tandis qu’un vert feuillage couvre d’ombre le côté bien aimé du ciel.35 . . . how to do justice to the physiognomy of a paper that has none? Today Carlist, tomorrow Republican, the day after Phalansterian, at times sincere, the Corsaire-Satan seems like old Proteus to take all aspects and all forms, in politics and in literature. Here a page overflowing with poetry, creativity, there a page of second-rate drivel; here, youth, enthusiasm, faith, there, decrepitude; . . . the Corsaire-Satan is like a tree struck by lightning, with one side burned to a crisp at the same time green foliage shades the side well loved by the heavens.

The satire bitingly accentuates the sometimes anarchic quality produced by the Corsaire’s hybrid origins and styles; this environment provided the scenes of Baudelaire’s early literary life, scenes that explicitly found their way to the pages of La Silhouette, where Baudelaire himself is similarly but more gently lampooned. La Silhouette picks him up in mid-conversation: Baudelaire-Dufays: Voyez-vous, Vitu, les créanciers sont comme les femmes . . . on ne saurait trop les aimer. Eugène Delacroix me disait hier . . . Saint-Alme: Tiens, c’est joli ça; écrivez-nous donc ça. Baudelaire-Dufays: Vous savez bien que je n’écris pas, moi. —Oh, c’est juste, monsieur a trop de génie, monsieur nous fera quelque livre sur la peinture, comme l’an passé. Voyez-vous, vous n’avez pas le sens commun, et votre E. Delacroix vous tourne la tête.



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M. de Banville: Ne me parlez pas de A. Chénier; je ne voudrais pas pour un million avoir signé les vers de ce drôle. Je vous soupçonne de manger de la tragédie.36 Baudelaire-Dufays: You see, Vitu, creditors are like women . . . it’s not possible to love them too much. Delacroix was telling me yesterday, Saint-Alme: Hey, that’s good. Write that up for us. Baudelaire-Dufays: You know perfectly well I don’t write. —Oh, that’s right, the gentleman is too great a genius, the gentleman is going to produce some book on painting for us, like he did last year. Look, you don’t have any common sense. M. Delacroix has turned your head. Dufays: (Seriously) I’m not going to discuss it with you, sir. Look, Champfleury, chicanery and clichés will ruin art: it’s incredible, the number of new ideas I introduced in my book . . . I place myself under the protection of artists and the bourgeoisie . . . M. de Banville: Don’t talk to me about A. Chénier. I wouldn’t have signed my name to that joker’s poems for a million. And you, I suspect of living on tragedy.

Baudelaire’s tone, along with certain characteristic turns of phrase and attitudes he himself would later mock (as well as continue to espouse), is thus satirized and flattened, prosaically and journalistically enough, long before the inception of the prose poems. Yet the young Baudelaire as presented in this satire has much in common with the ironic perspective “La Chambre double” affords on its own speaker, whose unmarked pages have done little to stave off the knocking of creditors and hungry mistresses. The Silhouette satire thus anticipates a central theme of the prose poems: the intersection of sexual and financial transaction, a nexus through which Baudelaire, like a number of his compatriots, would increasingly see journalism itself. The act of selling one’s texts to the papers is frequently likened to prostitution, and such transactions are themselves forever lampooned in the Corsaire and elsewhere, as in Henri Murger’s reference to a poem “médico-chirurgicalosanore pour un dentiste célèbre qui subventionne mon inspiration à raison de quinze sous la douzaine d’alexandrins, un peu plus cher que les huîtres” (medico-surgical-osanore poem for a famous dentist who subsidizes my inspiration with fifteen cents per dozen alexandrines,



Dufays: Gravement: Je ne discute pas avec vous, monsieur . . . Voyezvous, Champfleury, le chic et le ponsif [sic] perdront l’art: c’est une chose incroyable le nombre d’idées neuves que j’ai introduites dans mon volume . . . Je me mets sous la protection des bourgeois et des artistes.

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a little bit more than the price of oysters).37 That the very choice of poetic form (the alexandrine, subject of any number of neoclassical discourses on propriety and purity) is now reduced to a financial consideration would seem to indicate that poetry, if subject to the same categories of purity and fallenness that apply to women, had very little distance left to fall. Such considerations, as well as a distaste for the political rivalries and backbiting at the editorial offices, led Baudelaire to turn from journalism at the end of the 1840s—although neither wholly nor permanently, as the prose poem project attests. This background and all its competing pretensions—its jockeying for linguistic and artistic position, its often bitter irony and bald humor centering on puns and the clash of registers—should not be forgotten as we consider the prose poems, and particularly the implications of Baudelaire’s choice to publish them in La Presse. With more of the tone and peculiarity of Baudelaire’s journalistic experience in mind, I return to the dedicatory letter that announced this choice of venue. It continues: Considérez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodités cette combinaison nous offre à tous, à vous, à moi et au lecteur. Nous pouvons couper où nous voulons, moi ma rêverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture: car je ne suspends pas la volonté rétive de celui-ci au fil interminable d’une intrigue superflue. Enlevez une vertèbre, et les deux morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine. Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister à part. Dans l’espérance que quelques-uns de ces tronçons seront assez vivants pour vous plaire et vous amuser, j’ose vous dédier le serpent tout entier. [emphasis added]38 Consider, if you will, what admirable conveniences this combination offers to everyone, to you, to me, to the reader. We can cut wherever we want—I my reverie, you the manuscript, the reader his reading: because I won’t hold the rebellious will of the latter to the interminable thread of a superfluous plot. Take out a vertebra, and the two pieces of this tortuous fantasy will rejoin effortlessly. Chop it into many fragments, and you will see that each piece can exist on its own. In the hope that one of these little sections will be lively enough to please and amuse you, I dare to dedicate the entire serpent to you.

Clearly, Baudelaire is at play. The rhetoric both butters up Houssaye and slices at him, but the latter in a way the editor will likely miss. The slicing nonetheless is explicit and furthermore emphasizes the kind of combination of opposites that suggests—in a lighter tone—the journalistic combinations he rails against in Mon Coeur mis à nu. Here



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the “tortueuse fantaisie” does not horrify but rather makes all things possible for all constituents, “sans peine” or, as the draft more baldly put it, “commode” for all concerned. Thus Baudelaire can mock and dream, Houssaye can be flattered and fill his Presse, and the reader can make what he likes of it. In a text that so announces its multivalence, we would do well to listen to all its jokes. Or at least we are at liberty to take whatever reading suits us, since poetry is announcing its arrival in a milieu notorious for its bald puns. The piece of furniture (“commode”) named but not indicated by the rhetoric of commodified convenience is explicitly designed, furthermore, for the storage of the clothing we had to start wearing after listening to the snake the first time. With all the talk of cutting, furthermore, Baudelaire has rendered us all—poet, editor, and reader—“coupeurs.” And in making “la coupe” not only do we cut clothes to suit our figures, we mix discourses as we might adulterate wine with water; we might “cut someone off”—interrupt their flow of speech, as Baudelaire’s alter-ego so violently does to the vitrier—or even (in our writing, editing, or reading) place a pause between lines of poetry, a pause cut, perhaps, from the snaking prose lines of this collection. As tailors, we might cut clothes with or without a “queue” trailing after us, but as “tailleurs” we would cut them to fit, tail or no tail. Even such interlinguistic jokes, considering the strong influence of Poe throughout the collection, are not out of bounds. If both “queue” and “tête” share the same space “à la fois,” furthermore, if we cut one into the other, we might be left with “quête,” in the course of which as readers we may search for an answer to the poem’s riddles but fail to make heads or tails of it—while the poet and editor may seek only our money. This cutting of art into commodity has its other repercussions in the collection, as seen (but perhaps not read) by the readers of the popular press in Baudelaire’s later prose poem “La Corde”—and with reference to this prose poem, I argue in a later section, it is well to remember that Baudelaire accepted commissions from L’Innovateur, Moniteur des Cordonniers. For the present purpose, however, and keeping Baudelaire’s potential “cutting up” with puns on tailoring in mind, I cut to some tailors on punning.

L E C OUPEUR , JOURNA L

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TA ILLEURS

It was not admittedly the dedication’s rhetoric of cutting that led me to my next journal—this connection was first suggested by Graham Robb, whose research on Baudelaire and journalism has guided my own, first to The Silhouette and Henri Murger, and ultimately to the extraordinary 1840s journal Le Coupeur, Journal des Tailleurs.



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Baudelaire’s knowledge of the tailoring journal Le Coupeur is not documented, but it seems to have been edited by one of his friends during his tenure at the Corsaire, an era during which Baudelaire also took his first satiric swipe at Houssaye, hence perhaps providing some specific hidden context for the “Dédicace.”39 As I explore in more detail in the subsequent chapter, a variety of evidence suggests Baudelaire was taken with the idea of writing driven by the kind of “hidden” pun celebrated by Poe as well as by certain literalizations of rhetorical figure. Keeping this interest in mind, I turn to this extraordinary journal that combines the splicing of styles and registers with its primary concern with the “splicing” of fabric. No amount of paraphrase can really do justice to the strange, ironic clash of discourses and registers that characterize this publication’s numbers in its early years. The “chocs” and “conflits” produced on the pages of Le Coupeur create a range of tonal and formal effects that recall the naive rhetorical gaffes or the “chance encounters” of subjects and genres effected by newspaper columns and the kind of overtly satirical venom characteristic of the more literary and intellectual Corsaire-Satan. These conflicts, however, seem different in degree if not necessarily in kind. Le Coupeur, at least in its early years, seems to have been edited by someone with a distinctly subversive and quite nasty sense of humor, someone with a sensitivity toward language who is also intent on both self-violation and attack, someone at once taken with and affronted by absurdity, and who above all exploits doubleness for (simultaneous) financial and verbal gain. The following excerpt from the regular column on hatmaking testifies to all the above: CHAPELLERIE L’obstination est-elle une preuve de capacité?—Non; un critique a dit que l’entêtement étai t [sic] la force d’esprit des sots.—Un instant, monsieur le journaliste, ne jouons pas sur les mots: on peut être obstiné sans être entêté; il y a là une question grammaticale.—Je m’incline devant votre objection, monsieur et cher lecteur, puisque nous en sommes, de vous à moi, aux plus rigoureuses convenances du langage, tout en professant l’uu [sic] pour l’autre, je me flatte de cette idée, une déférence également motivée; mais revenons, s’il vous plaît, à notre question principale, celle des chapeaux, après avoir très-rapidement ébauché celle de la grammaire. L’abbé Girard nous dit, dans l’édition de Lyon, an IX, des Synonymes français, page 59, titre 67, vol. Ier, que l’entêté cède à un excès de prévention qui le séduit, et l’empêche d’approuver ou de goûter tout autre opinion qui n’est pas la sienne. Là, il y a par conséquent abus de force



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morale, il y a indocilité ou suffisance, qui fait qu’il ne compte pour rien les opinions d’autrui. L’obstiné s’acharne à ne pas quitter la voie bonne ou douteuse, arriérée ou non dans laquelle il s’est engagé; chez lui il n’y a pas conviction d’esprit, il y a volonté revêche, il y a mutinerie affectée, qui tient un peu de l’impolitesse et de toute absence de jugement. Or donc, quand en dépit des avis de la presse, Réné Gausseran surgage ses chapeaux amazones de voiles de tricot, en couleur jonquille, sable ou poussière, cet habile chapelier fait bien un peu preuve d’obstination. En s’acharnant à imposer aux dames des costumes d’amazone, ayant plutôt l’air de gilets de flanelle que de corsages Louis XIII, costumes dont personne ne veut, il est un tailleur fort recommandable, du reste, mais qui prouve que son pays est fertile en gens entêtés.40 Is obstinacy evidence of capacity ?—No; a critic has said that pigheadedness is a fool’s strength of mind—Just a moment, Mr Journalist, we aren’t playing on words; one can be obstinate without being pigheaded; it is a grammatical question.—I bow before your objection, sir and dear reader, because we have, between the two of us, arrived at more rigorous proprieties of language; all the while professing for each other, I flatter myself to believe, an equally sincere deference. We will return, by your leave, to our principal question of hats after very quickly sketching out this issue of grammar. The abbé Girard has said, in the year IX Lyon edition of French Synonyms, page 59, heading 67, volume one, that a pigheaded person yields to an excess of prejudice that seduces him and prevents him from approving or even testing any opinion that is not his own. In that case, it is the consequence of an abuse of moral force, a question of recalcitrance or conceit that makes the opinions of others count for nothing. The obstinate man strives not to leave the path—whether it is good or doubtful, backwards or not—he is currently following, for him it is not a conviction of mind, it is a surly will, an affected mutiny, that smacks of impoliteness and a total lack of judgment. Therefore, when in spite of the advice of the press, Réné Gausseran loads his Amazonian hats with jersey knit drapery the color of daffodils, sand, or dust, this skilled hatmaker has given some evidence of obstinacy. In striving to impose on our ladies these amazonian suits that have more the air of flannel waistcoats than Louix XIII bodices, outfits no one wants, this tailor, otherwise greatly to be recommended, proves that his country is fertile ground for pigheadedness.

Although claiming to rest on a grammatical distinction, the passage pressures lexical distinction to an absurd extent (given its purported subject of hatmaking). Rather than on grammar, the passage turns on a series of fairly bald puns whose terms are nonetheless elided, a technique that works only because extravagant attention is paid to intricacies of



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meaning called upon to clarify a distinction between words—but not the distinctions on which the humor of the passage relies. The overt distinction—between obstinacy and pigheadness, arguably a “distinction without a difference” except at the level of the signifier—gives rise to the heavy-handed joke about hat fashion (the ostensible topic of the article) at the end. This is the joke for the readership, presumably the tailors or hatmakers in question. As is often the case with this particular journal, however, the writer indulges in another kind of humor, frequently quite funny but mean-spirited, at the expense of its own readership. The passage appears to take up a debate about a correlation between stubbornness and “capacity” that “a critic” debunks. The correlation applied to “obstination” by association with its synonym “entêtement” has been read literally—not grammatically, but etymologically—to imply that the stubborn head or mind has more in it. This implication in turn suggests an equivalence between mental capacity as figural language for intelligence and capacity as literal volume measure, physical head size, an association the hatmaking readership (the writer seems to assume) would be more than comfortable with. In the language of flattery, the writer proceeds to include himself, his tailor-reader, and the critic-journalist in a community equally concerned about language—continuing based on the literalization implicit in “entêtement” (“[j]e m’incline devant votre objection”) and despite the imagined and inscribed protestations of the readership (“ne jouons pas sur les mots”). The text goes on to justify its twists and turns to the readers who may well be awaiting enlightenment on hatmaking: Cette petite digression ne nous a guère avancés dans la justification du titre du présent article: aussi demandons-nous pardon à nos lecteurs d’avoir d’avoir [sic] usé de la sorte quelques colonnes d’un journal auquel nous donnons, ainsi qu’à l’ÉLÉGANT (1)41 tous nos soins; mais il n’est pas, selon nous, tout à fait déplacé d’accorder de temps à autre quelques lignes à des discussions pacifiques, et auxquelles il serait plus utile qu’on ne pense que les artistes voulussent bien prêter, à tel titre que l’on voudrait, une attention qui tournerait au profit du commerce en général, puisque la solution de ces questions pourrait aider à projeter un peu de cette lumière qui manque encore dans l’exercice de la plupart des professions. Les éléments du langage, la valeur expliquée des mots, leur arrangement, en un mot l’orthographe et la syntaxe sont loin d’être assez connues; et pourtant, comment, sans leur concours, pouvoir expliquer et comprendre les détails de la vente et de la confection? Il y a une grave question d’amour-propre bien placé et de résultats bien calculés. This little digression has hardly advanced our justification of the title of the present article: we also beg the pardon of our readers for having



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used several columns of a newspaper on which we lavish, together with The Elegant, all our care; but it is not, in our opinion, so completely out of place to grant a few lines from time to time to such uncontentious discussions, to which it would be more useful than one might think for artists to willingly pay heed, however they care to frame it. Indeed, such attention would yield a profit to commerce in general, since the solution to these questions could aid in shedding a little much-needed light on the exercise of most professions. The elements of language, the value of explicating words, their arrangement, in a word, orthography and syntax are far from being sufficiently known; and yet how, without their cooperation, can one explain and comprehend the details of sales and tailoring? It is an important issue of selfrespect and precision.

The ironic structure of the passage, which at once flatters and mocks its readership, prefigures the tone not only of Baudelaire’s letter of dedication but of a number of poems in the collection—as typified by the tone of the prose “Invitation au voyage” and “Une Hémisphère dans une chevelure,” which, as Johnson argues, deflates the metaphoric heights of the verse doublets by the introduction of journalistic idiom into a play of images that in the verse evokes a realm of “poésie pure.” This tone is not unidirectional, however, but can be read both “with” and “against the grain” much like the “Dédicace,” ironizing its reader in a tone it anticipates the reader himself will find flattering. The purported hatters’ column also imagines its hatter readers as pleased to find themselves included in the ranks of the educated, but it makes this suggestion in a tone recognizable as ironic to “initiates” in the ranks, say, of the “petits crétins,” calling on language in all its nuances to serve commerce, which now, in the journalistic era, in the era in which commercial pursuits aspire toward the arts, itself depends on language to secure the flow of commercial traffic.42 Language in the age of journalism has become “Commode pour moi. Commode pour vous. Commode pour le Lecteur.” The unknown editor of Le Coupeur, however, seems also to be on a secret mission to reclaim the columns of the tailoring journal as literary space. “Les éléments du langage, la valeur expliquée des mots, leur arrangement” clearly are of great importance. Another of Robb’s suggestions—a possible identity for the mysterious editor of Le Coupeur—likewise seems sound: Murger, co-“crétin” with Baudelaire on the Corsaire-Satan as well as the inventor of “Bohemia” as a social space. Scènes de la vie de Bohème (source for Puccini’s La Bohème) was first serialized in the Corsaire and then produced as a play, which Baudelaire also saw; Baudelaire defends the work as a



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classic of “the realism of youth” and refers to its author sympathetically as “pauvre ombre.”43 Murger’s main character, Rodolphe,—a young poet down on his luck—is editor of two fashion journals, “L’Écharpe d’Iris” and “Castor,” a journal of hatmaking, known to opera lovers for providing the opportunity for Rodolfo, lagging behind his friends for “five minutes” to write an article, to meet Mimi. In Murger’s original, however, these publications resurface a number of times, ironizing the commodification of verbal matter in the “pay by the line” economy in which Murger sells his wares. In a scene that must also have been familiar to the young Baudelaire, poor Rodolphe is forced to sell his writing to a more prominent critic, whose name will of course yield him far more for Rodolphe’s words than they could fetch under Rodolphe’s own. The critic plans to splice in some of his own writing, hoping with this hybrid to fetch the per-word sum he has agreed to: Voilà mon analyse; c’est carrément fait, reprit Rodolphe. [Critique]—Oui, mais c’est court. —En mettant des tirets, et en développant votre opinion critique, ça prendra de la place. —Je n’ai guère le temps, mon cher, et puis mon opinion critique ne prend pas assez de place. —Vous mettrez un adjectif tous les trois mots. —Est-ce que vous ne pourriez pas me faufiler à votre analyse une petite ou plutôt une longue appréciation de la pièce, hein? demanda le critique. Dame, dit Rodolphe, j’ai bien mes idées sur la tragédie, mais je vous préviens que je les ai imprimées trois fois dans le Castor, et l’Écharpe d’Iris. —C’est égal, combien ça fait-il de lignes, vos idées?44 Here is my analysis; it’s all done, said Rodolphe. [Critic]—Yes, but it’s short. —By putting in dashes and expanding on your critical opinion, you’ll take up more space. —I don’t have enough time, my dear man, and my critical opinion won’t take up enough space. —You can put in an adjective every three words. —Couldn’t you just tack on a little, or, rather, a long appreciation of the play to your analysis? eh? asked the critic. —Heavens, said Rodolphe, I have plenty of ideas about tragedy, but I must warn you that I’ve printed them three times in the Castor and in L’Echarpe d’Iris. —Doesn’t matter. Your ideas—how many lines will they fill?



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If the fictional Castor has reprinted a treatise on a tragedy several times for the pleasure of its hatmaker readers, it has good company in its real-world peer journal (and, as Robb speculates, its likely model). Le Coupeur in its extraordinary regular feature “Art du Tailleur” contains frequent discourses on aesthetics, on “les limites de l’art”— proportions, of course, of the human figure, their artistic importance, and their significance for trade, all at once. It celebrates the Renaissance (“l’époque où les arts ont refleuri en Occident” (“the epoch of the reflowering of the arts in the West”)) and its “règles si utiles et desquelles il faudrait faire l’application en vingt professions différentes” (“useful rules which must apply to twenty different professions”), citing sources: “il faut citer Albert Durer dont l’ouvrage date de 1534, et fut écrit en latin; une traduction fort estimable parut en 1614 avec des planches gravées sur bois; les éléments furent les mêmes que ceux de Léonard de Vinci, de Poussin, etc.”45 (we must cite Albrecht Durer, whose work dates from 1534, and was written in Latin; a quite estimable translation appeared in 1614 with woodplate engravings; the elements were the same as those of Leonardo da Vinci, Poussin, etc.). The practice of payment by volume, of course, provides the most likely and compelling reason for citing diverse sources in detail—a more inventive strategy than adding an adjective every three words. Even taking economics into account, however, juxtaposing the notion of “l’Art du Tailleur” with the masters of the Renaissance seems to cause the editor a particularly rageful glee. And Le Coupeur yields far stranger juxtapositons: CHAPELLERIE Des érudits font remonter l’usage de ce genre de coiffure aux temps les plus anciens, et nous qui nous piquons pas d’être des érudits, nous qui n’aurons jamais l’honneur d’appartenir à l’une des cinq classes de l’Institut, nous croyons que le chapeau, ou coiffure analogue date de plus loin encore que ce que nos savants et surtout les théologiens romains appellent les temps anciens, attendu que, suivant notre gros bon sens, l’univers, immortel comme son auteur, n’a pas eu de commencement et n’aura point de fin, et que si, tant est que notre pauvre globe ait eu un commencement, non comme création absolue, mais uniquement comme modification et condensation de la matière, si, en outre, il doit subir une nouvelle modification qui change l’aspect de la matière, toujours est-il qu’il y a si longtemps de cela et le cataclysme ou modification totale ne devra avoir lieu que dans tant de siècles, qu’on peut dire que l’histoire, telle que nous la possédons, avec ses erreurs, ses omissions et son obscurité, ne nous révèle qu’un court espace de temps, qu’une série d’événements dont le nombre est plus que minime



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Nous savons bien que tout ce que nous avançons là est diamétralement opposé à ce que nous disent les Écritures, mais quoi?—Nous avons nos raisons pour ne considérer la Bible que comme un roman historique, mal traduit jadis d’une langue morte et dont on n’est plus à même d’apprécier le génie. Nous croyons donc, pour revenir à nos chapeaux, qu’il serait superflu d’en rechercher l’origine au delà des temps actuellement connus. C’est dans les pays chauds, dans les Indes et surtout au Thibet, qu’on en trouve les premiers vestiges. Les lamas portent des chapeaux rouges dont les cardinaux furent sans doute jaloux. Les Lacédémoniens portaient des chapeaux de feutre pour se distinguer de leurs esclaves. Les Romains portaient de larges chapeaux en voyage ou à la campagne. Il y avait plus de deux siècles qu’on se servait de chapeaux en Bretagne, qu’on ne les connaissait à peine pas à Paris, qui n’était pas encore la métropole du monde artistique comme il l’est aujourd’hui.46 HATMAKING Scholars have traced the use of this type of headdress to the most ancient times, and we who do not pride ourselves on being scholars, who would never have the honor of belonging to one of the five classes of the Institute, believe that the hat or analogous headdress dates back even further than what our savants and above all the Roman theologians call “ancient times,” inasmuch as, following our great common sense, the universe, immortal as its author, has no beginning and no end. And if, to the extent that our poor globe had a beginning, it was not an absolute creation, but solely a modification and condensation of matter, if, furthermore, it must sustain a new modification that changes the aspect of matter, this process of change must always last so long, and the cataclysm or total modification must transpire over so many centuries, that one could claim that such history as we possess, with its errors, its omissions, and its obscurity, reveals nothing to us but a short space of time, a series of events of which the number is minimal in proportion to all those that have already transpired and on which time has successively extended its leaden shroud! We know perfectly well that everything we have here advanced is diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Scriptures, but what of it?—We have our reasons for considering the Bible as nothing more than a historical novel, poorly translated at some point from a dead language, a tale the genius of which we are no longer likely to appreciate.



en proportion de tous ceux qui se sont accomplis et sur lesquels le temps a successivement étendu son linceul de plomb!

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It is in hot climates, in the Indies and above all in Tibet, that the first vestiges can be found. Lamas wore red hats that would undoubtedly excite jealousy in cardinals. The Lacedemonians wore felt hats to distinguish themselves from their slaves. The Romans wore large hats when they travelled. Brittany had been using hats for over two centuries when they were still largely unknown in Paris, which was not yet the art capital that it is today.

From the history of hats to the history of the universe to the nature of matter to the nature of history to the poorly translated and largely fictional Bible—the interpenetration of hatmaking and atheist cosmology is as odd as any Surrealist “exquisite corpse” could be. Baudelaire planned a prose poem on hats, but Le Coupeur delivered. If this real-life tailoring journal is indeed the model for the hatmaking journal of Murger’s fiction, then we can believe he also published the work of his friends, as Rodolphe does in his novel—in particular the work of an impecunious philosopher (Colline, opera fans may remember) who might thus also receive some remuneration for his otherwise less than lucrative theories.47 In Scènes, Murger also depicts efforts to effect the penetration of the literary elite (in the terms suggested by Baudelaire’s “Exposition” essay) by the hatmaking journal—a reciprocal action equally motivated by financial concerns. Rodolphe seeks to increase his subscription rates by creating a demand for the hatmaking journal among the café set: M. Rodolphe avait même obligé le café à s’abonner au Castor, dont il était rédacteur en chef. Le Maître de l’établissement s’y était d’abord refusé, mais comme M. Rodolphe et sa compagnie appelaient tous les quarts d’heure le garçon, et criaient à haute voix: Le Castor! apporteznous le Castor! Quelques autres abonnés, dont la curiosité était excitée par ces demandes acharnées, demandèrent aussi le Castor. On prit donc un abonnement au Castor, journal de la chapellerie, qui paraissait tous les mois, orné d’une vignette et d’un article de philosophe en Variétés, par Gustave Colline.48 M. Rodolphe even obliged the café to subscribe to Le Castor [The Beaver], of which he was editor in chief. The owner refused at first, but as M. Rodolphe and his companions called for the waiter every fifteen minutes, shouting at the top of their lungs “Le Castor! Bring us The Castor”! some other customers, their curiosity piqued by these furious demands, also ordered Le Castor. Thus they took out a subscription



We believe, then, to return to our hats, that it would be pointless to research their origins beyond the times with which we are actually familiar.

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In another instance of circulation and exchange, the transaction with the vulgar yet famous critic is necessitated by a date Rodolphe has made for the evening (in the days before Mimi): Un samedi soir, . . . Rodolphe fit connaissance, à sa table d’hôte, d’une marchande à la toilette en chambre, appelée mademoiselle Laure. Ayant appris que Rodolphe était rédacteur en chef de l’Écharpe d’Iris et du Castor, journaux de fashion, la modiste, dans l’espérance d’obtenir des réclames pour ses produits, lui fit une foule d’agaceries significatives. À ces provocations, Rodolphe avait répondu par un feu d’artifice de madrigaux à rendre jaloux Benserade, Voiture et tous les Ruggieri du style galant; et à la fin du dîner, mademoiselle Laure, ayant appris que Rodolphe était poète, lui donna clairement à entendre qu’elle n’était pas éloignée de l’accepter pour son Pétrarque. Elle lui accorda même, sans circonlocution, un rendez-vous pour le lendemain. —Parbleu! se disait Rodolphe en reconduisant mademoiselle Laure, voilà certainement une aimable personne. Elle me paraît avoir de la grammaire et une garde-robe assez cossue. Je suis tout disposé à la rendre heureuse.49 One Saturday evening . . . Rodolphe made the acquaintance . . . of a revendeuse of ladies’ fashions by the name of Mademoiselle Laure. Having learned that Rodolphe was editor in chief of L’Echarpe d’Iris and Le Castor, both fashion magazines, the milliner, in hope of receiving some advertising for her wares, made a series of meaningful coquetries in his direction. Rodolphe responded to these provocations with a fireworks display of madrigals that would have made Benserade, Voiture, and all the Ruggieri of the galant style jealous; and at the end of the dinner, Mademoiselle Laure, having learned Rodolphe was a poet, gave him clearly to understand that she was far from reluctant to accept him as her Petrarch. She even, without circumlocution, granted him a rendez-vous for the following day. By Jove! Rodolphe said to himself as he took Mlle Laure home, here is a truly amiable person. She seems to have both a good command of grammar and an extensive wardrobe. I am entirely disposed to make her happy.

The quick shift in commercial exchange, from financial to sexual exchange (favors for advertising space), gives way even faster to “poetic” exchange (favors for “poetic” space). The passage erases any



to the Castor, a hatmaking journal that appeared each month adorned with a vignette and an article on philosophy by Gustave Colline in its Variety section.

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distinction between journalism, poetry, and prostitution and unites the “commodiousness” of a wardrobe and grammar. Questions of direct influence, of course, are difficult to prove and ultimately not entirely interesting, but it is certain that the general game Murger was playing was a topic of conversation and raillery— and the practice of selling aesthetic or philosophical theory to unlikely trade publications was more common than is widely understood, as Baudelaire’s unfinished undertaking for L’Innovateur suggests. The fragmented discourse, the juxtaposition of intellectual, spiritual, commercial, and the most literally material concerns of fabric and how to cut it, along with the mutually deforming interpenetration of the literary and the quotidian, all seem to lead directly—down the stairs with the glazier. The clashes that play out so bizarrely on Le Coupeur’s pages are condensed and intensified throughout the prose poems. Therein, Baudelaire’s own felt conflicts between ideal and actual, between the aesthetic as transcendent beauty on the one hand and as violation on the other, find their most dramatic expression. In, for example, “Le Mauvais Vitrier”—which, as I discuss in my introduction, I find paradigmatic of these conflicts and their associated effects—the difficulty in pinning down the text’s attitude toward its espoused views, its speaker, and even its victim recalls the duplicitous tone of the Coupeur editor who seems to mock himself and his readers at once. Baudelaire’s text—remarkably—reads equally well as (a) a celebration of aesthetic principles at all costs, (b) an attack on realism and the quotidian world it represents, and (c) a bitterly ironic critique of the same positions. “Le Mauvais Vitrier” thus encapsulates all the schizophrenic, self-violating tendencies of Baudelaire’s relationship to his own texts and theories and those of his contemporaries and idols (its opening is lifted almost straight from Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse.”) Its take-no-prisoners attitude spares nothing (least of all itself) from a kind of scathing yet jubilant “ivresse” of violence. The poetic rejection of clear glass, as represented in the throwing open of the window, has had its consequences: “Ces plaisanteries nerveuses ne sont pas sans péril, et on peut souvent les payer cher.” (These neurotic pleasantries are not without peril, and one can often pay dearly for them.) The prose poem and its concluding line can be read in two directions: it narrates not only the interruption or disruption of aesthetic reverie by the intruding quotidian but also the invasion and deformation of that quotidian by the aesthetic—a phenomena Le Coupeur also gives ample opportunity to observe (poor tailors). “Le Mauvais vitrier,” then, following this second logic, also operates as an allegory of the violence inherent in any demand for aesthetic unity.



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This reading gathers force if we consider the prose piece in context with one of its explicitly evoked sources, to which Baudelaire archly refers as an inspiration in his “Dédicace.” The text in question is Houssaye’s “Vitrier”—a poem that preceded Baudelaire’s work in La Presse. Houssaye’s text presents a comforting tale of a poor glazier warmed by inclusion in the family of man over a drink and conversation (despite his inability to feed his family), and, presumably, by his inclusion in the poem.50 In every way, Baudelaire’s poem is the inverse of his predecessor’s (and current publisher’s) earlier work: Baudelaire’s “Bad glazier” emphasizes what a bad day it was for this poor workman when he stumbled into poetry. Baudelaire thus critiques yet another variety of imposed unity, this one less aesthetic (certainly less so in Houssaye’s poem) than political. Houssaye’s happy paternalism is turned—very literally—on its head and implicated, in turn, in Baudelaire’s critique of the aesthetic or poetic appropriation and representation of the poor. Of course Baudelaire implicates his own poem as well. Briefly looking ahead, the ethical cost of the aestheticizing, beautifying effects of poetry is also a topic Christina Rossetti addresses, as I argue in chapter 4, by reversing the dynamic and giving the poem’s voice to the aestheticized corpse or, alternately, to its disembodied spirit. The complexities of “Goblin Market,” however, suggest she shared similar concerns about an alternative poetics that exposes but also engages more explicitly in violence itself, rather than covering or effacing it. While like Baudelaire, Rossetti seems to revel in the potential poetic energy of a poetics of violence and to entertain the possibility, at least, of moral arguments for poetry as an alternative kind of material engagement, the direction of her later work suggests her reservations were more powerful than her enthusiasm. Similarly, her ambivalence about poetry’s “congress” with the popular and the mercantile is palpable even in her obvious enjoyment of the exchange and its “fruits” in “Goblin Market”—all of which I discuss at length in chapter 5. For Baudelaire, one final question this violent exchange prompts is whether, essentially, art shouldn’t be separated from the quotidian— and not for the sake of art. Should art be making slums beautiful with its application of colored glass any more than it should be subjecting people trying to make a living to its stringent aesthetic and formal demands? Is the aesthetic less a question of beauty than of beautification, a different matter, figured as dressing up and painting a street urchin (“La Corde”) or fitting windows in a slum with panes of colored glass (“Le Mauvais vitrier”)? Were the tailors better off for having their trade journal become an unheralded vanguard in the



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march to the poetic modern? Of course, on the one hand, it would seem that Baudelaire’s answer to all questions about art is, simply “On peut payer cher”—but art is worth the cost. On the other hand, he removes a sense of choice—it’s not clear anyone has the choice not to pay. Baudelaire seems to see the interpenetration of the quotidian and the aesthetic as necessary, though horrible. By presenting this interpenetration as an artistic device rather than an economic necessity, Baudelaire has transformed what seemed a regrettable corruption into an aesthetic procedure. In so doing, he transformed the structure of aesthetics from the adherence to a norm to its violation. Now, it seems, there’s no going back. What had been the “vehicle” of escape—poetic form—now asserts its material nature and thereby violates its own purity; “form” in the “daily grind(er)” of the prose poems has become a process rather than a fixity, poetry a violation of its own ideal. “On peut payer cher”—or buy alexandrines in bulk.



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3

T H E “ V I C T O R I A N B AU D E L A I R E ”

Victorian. Resembling or typified by the attitudes supposedly characteristic of the Victorian Era; prudish, strict; old-fashioned, out-dated. —Oxford English Dictionary Byron, Tennyson, Poe . . . Ciel mélancolique de la poésie moderne. Étoiles de première grandeur. —Charles Baudelaire

W

hen Rachel Teukolsky entitled her article on comparative nineteenth-century aesthetics “Modernist Ruskin, Victorian Baudelaire,” she drew on the shock effect one of her objects helped establish as valuable. Each noun phrase is a near oxymoron, and the chiasm reinforces that status: we cannot conceive of Ruskin as modern because he functions as a sign for all that is Victorian, while the converse is true for his French contemporary. Teukolsky sets out to recover the “Victorian modern” in Victorian terms and to restore to Baudelaire those aspects of his work that twentieth-century critiques, she claims, have jettisoned as retrograde or, that is, “Victorian.” In challenging the tradition in modern and postmodern thought that defines the modern in opposition to a dated and devalued Victorian era, Teukolsky opens her discussion of what she calls “deliberately perverse readings of Baudelaire and Ruskin” by way of Fredric Jameson. Jameson has argued that aspects of Baudelaire anticipate developments in modernist and postmodernist styles, but such an argument, Teukolsky observes, “necessitates that the more old-fashioned



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elements of Baudelaire’s poetics be set aside.”1 Jameson explicitly enumerates among these elements a “second-rate post-Romantic Baudelaire” who wrote poems containing elements as “funereal as the worst Victorian art photographs” that are “to be identified as the worst Victorian kitsch.”2 Finding Jameson’s essay “useful for some of the critical assumptions that still underpin most discussions of nineteenth-century aesthetics,” Teukolsky summarizes these assumptions as follows: that “nineteenth-century France is the home of art for art’s sake, a subversive neo-Kantian doctrine arguing for a shapeliness of art over any moralistic story or lesson”; and that the works of French writers led to “radical adventures in literary form” while “Victorian Britain . . . is represented by commodified art forms that rehearse middle-class pieties.”3 As I have argued in my introduction, similar assumptions apply equally or rather are amplified in the field of poetics, where “Victorian” indicate(d) to modernist audiences a kind of moral and poetic stuffiness entirely at odds with the French harbinger of the poetic modern and its long-term partnership with sexual and social transgression. In nineteenth-century poetry, French=new=modern, and Victorian=British=old. Yet the term “Victorian Baudelaire,” as it turns out, is as polyvalent as any. Jameson writes of “many Baudelaires,” and I find that these in turn give way to many “Victorian Baudelaires,” each playing out their phantom half-lives in varying degrees of improbability. The OED in its primary definition, for example, would proscribe a “Victorian Baudelaire” as a historical and political impossibility since Baudelaire, not being British, cannot be “Victorian,” a word that designates the England or Empire of a particular queen and her subjects. In what the Russian theorist Voloshinov would call a different “accent,” however, “the Victorian Baudelaire” names less an impossibility than a lack. It begs an antecedent interrogating an absence: “Why is there no ‘Victorian Baudelaire?’ ” or, as Ivan Kreilkamp refines the question, “why have we . . . no mid-nineteenth-century poet whose work participates, explicitly and consciously, in the early theorization of modernity?” Along similar lines, the phrase poses a challenge (as in, “find one!”) or makes a claim (as in, there is such a poet as Kreilkamp describes). This last interpretation prompts a related interrogative: “Who is the Victorian Baudelaire?” or, in other words, what British poet most closely resembles Baudelaire in style, influence, poetic project? In its least oxymoronic incarnation, furthermore, the same phrase names a reception history, identifying a Baudelaire as read by Victorian readers: Baudelaire translated, transposed, become a sign and a significance. Although all of these possibilities might generate



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original and informative studies—several of them appropriately entitled “Swinburne”—none precisely addresses my aims for placing Baudelaire in context with his Victorian contemporaries. Instead, this chapter examines what its title phrase taken at its most literal might signify: that is, how is Baudelaire himself “Victorian”? I mean the term not in the political sense defined by the OED, of course, and not necessarily, per Teukolsky, “Victorian” in ways a twentieth-century modernist reading would repudiate; that is, this inter-century tension within the term “modern” is not my particular focus here. I interrogate, rather, how Baudelaire is “Victorian” in terms of linguistic and literary use, context, and influence. With that distinction in mind, however, much of my research has indeed focused on considering the presence in Baudelaire’s work of what Teukolsky calls “the elements modernism would disallow,” and I have placed particular emphasis on two categories she names. First, I have been concerned in detail with Baudelaire’s “investments in mass culture.” As I argued in chapter 2, Baudelaire’s prose poetry does not transcend the press’s desecration of the literary but rather joins right in, taking its material and formal cues from the process. I am making a similar claim about Baudelaire’s relationship with English-language literature and, more narrowly, with Victorian British literature. Teukolsky also identifies Baudelaire’s “persistent anglophilia” as one of the “elements modernism would disallow,” following her setup of Jameson’s equation of “Victorian” with kitsch. I address some of the formal and metrical effects of this “persistent anglophilia” in chapter 1, but whereas in that context, I restricted my argument to the textual and practical effects of Baudelaire’s reading of Poe on his developing prose poetics, here my concern is broader. I want to consider how Baudelaire used Victorian English cultural references and resonance as well as actual linguistic and literary material to construct not only his understanding but also his textual embodiment of the modern. In many ways, the underlying logic of my argument is less historicist than chronological: Baudelaire, after all, inhabits the same historical era as “Victorians.” And, far from considering his contemporaries across the Channel—or Atlantic—as “old-fashioned” and “outdated,” he looked to them for inspiration, material, and approval. My broad question for this chapter is as follows: what did Baudelaire find in his anglophone contemporaries, and what did he take from them? My answers converge with an increasingly narrow focus on the literary dimensions of his work rather than on questions of national or cultural identity: I engage an interlinguistic and intercultural dynamic as it plays out in the specific text, the specific image, even



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the specific word. Even this narrowed focus opens too broad a field, however. Baudelaire’s translations, appropriations, and transpositions of English-language sources constitute too large a body of work to consider in the kind of detail necessary to my argument about Baudelaire’s poetics. Fortunately, much of this work has been done: Emily Salines’ Alchemy and Amalgam: Translation in the Works of Charles Baudelaire sustains critical attention on what its author rightly terms a “lacuna” in the voluminous critical literature on Baudelaire, and this chapter draws a great deal on its careful research.4 Rather than attempt to reprise such an extensive project here, I focus closely on several distinct instances of overlap and interplay, identifying concrete, traceable citations and contacts. Having identified these specificities, however, I abandon them for connections they only suggest. I approach this question of Baudelaire’s “Victorian-ness” in three moments. First, I identify the extent of his engagement with Romantic and post-Romantic literature in English, thus establishing a kind of textual common ground with his Victorian contemporaries. To this end, I review and contextualize Baudelaire’s use of English sourcetexts with relation to three distinct areas: the transgressive poetics of the prose poems, the cultural significance of English in midcentury France, and period norms of literary property and originality. Second, I clarify how English language and British literature as such function as a cultural sign in France, an understanding I have based on French periodical engagement with British texts during the period directly preceding Baudelaire’s most productive years. Again, I have focused on the years of Baudelaire’s youth, the period most formative of the literary attitudes with which he entered his writing career, an assumption that also guided my attention to the journalism of the 1840s. Certainly, “American” and “British” signify in distinct ways in France during this period; in my discussion of journalism, I emphasize the significance of British origin. I do not, however, always maintain this distinction, in part for the reasons of terminological clunk I gloss in my introduction. Thus, since “Victorian” frequently modifies American-origin nouns in common usage, I sometimes use it to signify “Victorian-era” writings in English. Furthermore, the AngloAmerican distinction is not always in play, since in a French context the English language takes on valences acquired from both frames of reference as well as simply the valence acquired by not being French, while for Baudelaire all English-language texts are bathed in the warm light of his Poe-love. In the third section, then, I return to this Poe dynamic, and take a particular transposition—or rather, a series of transpositions, from Poe to Hood to Baudelaire in “Any Where Out of the World” and, more covertly, I argue, in “La Corde”—and



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consider at a more intricate textual level how translinguistic citation functions in the transgressive context of the prose poem. A ND

E NGLISH

Byron. Tennyson. E. Poe. Lermontoff. Leopardi. Espronceda. —Mais ils n’ont pas chanté Margot. Eh! quoi! je n’ai pas cité un Français. La France est pauvre. —Baudelaire

In chapter 1, I argued that Poe influenced the prose poem from the conceptual level to details of metrical and rhythmic traces. Before embarking on a discussion that will occasionally bracket Poe, I want to stress the simple fact that Baudelaire’s interest in and devotion to Poe dwarfs by far his interest in any other writer, living or dead, of any nationality, and that French (and American) critics who greatly prefer Baudelaire to his American predecessor are still working to explain the circumstance away. With whatever degree of ambivalence, however, the Baudelaire-Poe relationship has received critical attention. Therefore, while the Poe translations constitute both the inspiration for and the most significant accomplishment arising from Baudelaire’s flirtations with English-language letters and thus remain central to my topic here, I wish also to draw attention to other significant points of interest that suggest broader patterns of engagement and use. In this section, then, I establish Baudelaire as a writer with a significant if not overpowering interest in Anglo-American literature and culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a powerful personal and professional (economic) interest in translating the same, and a desire to infuse the French tradition with some of the interest he was finding abroad. To these varied ends, then, in addition to the kinds of allusions and borrowings in which all texts engage, Baudelaire published translations—those he acknowledged and those he did not. Most significant, again, are his translations of Poe’s prose and five of his verse poems; the remaining major translations are as follows: Le Jeune Enchanteur, an unattributed translation of a text by a Reverend Croly that was long misidentified as originally written by Baudelaire. Some English songs. An unfinished translation of Longfellow’s Hiawatha (as Salines notes, an “occasion for experiments with the rendering of poetry and with varying levels of transformation”).5 Thomas Hood’s “The Bridge of Sighs.”



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Baudelaire’s journals and intimate writings—Fusées, Hygiène, and Mon coeur mis à nu—quote from English-language sources ranging from the now obscure Campbell and Maria Clemm to Milton. These personal writings also include a number of extracts from Emerson’s Conduct of Life copied in English, as well as the tantalizing phrase, in English, “Self-purification and anti-humanity.”6 Baudelaire’s Carnet—largely devoted to lists of debts, projects, and outstanding obligations— features letters to Swinburne on six different “to do” lists. The very title “Mon Coeur mis à nu” derives from Poe—and rather defies him.7 Of the prose poems that have been my particular focus, “La Chambre double,” as I have suggested, recalls elements of Poe’s “Philosophy of Furniture” and “Le Mauvais Vitrier” incorporates part of “The Imp of the Perverse”; in addition, “Le Joueur généreux” echoes Tennyson’s “Lotos Eaters,” as Robert Kopp has shown, and “Les Bons Chiens” addresses itself directly to Lawrence Sterne. “Any Where Out of the World,” of course, takes its title from Thomas Hood and its first line from Emerson’s “Conduct of Life.”8 The above fall into the category of what we would now consider “fair use,” although, as I discuss below, projecting twentieth-century understandings of intellectual property onto the nineteenth century is misleading at best. In the more nebulous category of adaptation or transformation, the following are more or less established as fact: Un Mangeur d’opium is adapted from Thomas De Quincey. Baudelaire’s two essays “Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses ouevres” and “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe” draw not only on Poe’s own work but on the text of other American articles, debts that are not acknowledged. “Le Flambeau vivant” translates part of Poe’s text “To Helen,” while “Le Guignon” combines Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” with Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life.” These borrowings are of particular interest conceptually, I believe, because Baudelaire himself expressed ambivalence about the practice. How do these borrowings, linguistic border-crossings, and arguably thefts figure in what I have defined as Baudelaire’s transgressive aesthetic and even more transgressive poetic practice? When Baudelaire publishes a translated work under his own name, is he committing international larceny, stealing English originality and presenting it as aesthetic revolution in France? Is this action simply transgressive because transnational, aimed at corrupting the purity of French poetics with English rhythms? Or is it also transgressive because it amounts to theft, dishonesty, plagiarism, as Baudelaire himself suggested?9 Baudelaire’s transpositions and appropriations of source-texts have long raised questions about the “originality” of his work despite scholarly cautions against anachronistically projecting



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twentieth-century norms and laws onto the nineteenth century, during which “free” translation and other forms of borrowing were standard and accepted. Along similar lines, furthermore, we should be cautious about projecting the assumptions about appropriation and collage now typical of conceptual avant-garde poetry and visual arts—wherein practitioners view the arrangement and manipulation of source material as a challenge to received notions about subjectivity, originality, creativity, and property—onto a prior century.10 Crossperiod and cross-national differences render these questions thorny to say the least. Yet certainly it would be helpful if, to gauge the transgressive valence of Baudelaire’s practice in his own context, we might answer the following question: to what extent, and against what and whom, might Baudelaire have engaged in appropriation as an act of aesthetic and literary transgression? To what extent was Baudelaire, in turning to English to transform French poetics, on the one hand, and adapting and presenting translations as his own work, on the other, going against or in accord with prevailing critical currents? Was he being stealthy and subversive, a little naughty, or simply lazy? Salines’ work provides important context for considering these questions. She documents not only the contemporary property laws governing Baudelaire’s own era but also, significantly, the assumptions about originality, genius, and rule-breaking he would have inherited from the Romantics. In particular, she cites Victor Hugo— always a charged name in a Baudelairean context—espousing similar views and in a similar vein to the passage from the preface to Les Orientales I discussed in chapter 1. Here as well, Hugo rejects with scorn the classical ideals of imitation and adherence to the rules: “Suivez les règles! Imitez les modèles! (. . .) Le reflet vaut-il la lumière?” (Follow the rules! Imitate models! . . . Is a reflection then worth as much as light itself?) Salines here also references Kant, from whom such Romantic ideas of genius derive: “Every one is agreed on the point of the complete opposition between genius and the spirit of imitation.”11 Drawing on critiques by period (Proudhon) and more recent scholars (Robert Mortier, Pierre Bourdieu, Françoise Meltzer), she then outlines the liberal, postrevolutionary, post-Romantic context in which notions about literary property and aesthetic value became intertwined in Baudelaire’s day. The “cult of the new” is thus seen to emerge as a function of market forces rather than aesthetic adventure, and such a critique seems to strike at the heart of a Baudelaireian aesthetic that celebrates the new and the modern as values. Salines’ research also reveals a different understanding of textual borrowing: via Proudhon, she suggests an alternative period




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model in which exchange and assimilation among writers and readers are not exchanges of property because they belong to an intellectual fund held in common.12 Whereas Salines ultimately sees Baudelaire’s appropriations as mounting a challenge to the capitalist “authorship” model, however, I would place greater emphasis on what she calls the “transgression créatrice” of these appropriations. That is, in keeping with what I see as the Baudelairean principle “the lines you cross should be your own,” while Baudelaire may well be challenging a liberal model of authorship, ownership, and authorial control, this challenge is so charged for him precisely because it simultaneously emphasizes and undercuts the union of the visionary dreamer with the “cloud merchant,” a union that he repeatedly finds at once compelling and repellent. Baudelaire may want to believe that the poet transcends the market, but he knows he needs it, too. While recognizing early that the “authorship” model is exploited and undermined by journalistic and literary practice, furthermore, he also resents any critical encroachment on his own “branding.” In other words, as I suggested in chapter 2, Baudelaire sees and hates the interpenetration of the poet and the market yet feels compelled to represent and literalize this interpenetration as well as to undermine its assumptions. At the same time, he can profit from these representations and literalizations, “reselling” the translated material of others for his own byline and “by line” remuneration: “Commode pour moi. Commode pour vous. Commode pour le lecteur.” The difference between appropriating English-language literary texts, however, and drawing on the “unartistic” sources of journalism, street argot, or the gestures and actions of mistresses, vendors, and street urchins, merits further consideration. The latter sources, however constructed and “artistic” they may themselves appear on closer examination, at least initially fall into the paradigm suggested by Benjamin’s ragpicker model. Celebrated works of English and American poetry and even prose, however, do not share the status of “rags,” even at first glance. As Sharon Marcus has argued, the term “transnational” generally applies to international relations across a power gradient, a structure that does not apply to literary relations between England and France. Rather than embrace either this contemporary “transnational” model or the Baudelairean crossclass equivalent—the vertical crossings examined in the previous chapter—we need to return to the model suggested by Baudelaire’s own “homme du monde” of the “Exposition Universelle” and envision his mutually coercive, mutually penetrating, and violating gaze now turned on the “splendeurs orientales réfléchies dans le poétique



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POÉTIQUE MIROIR DE L’ESPRIT A NGL A IS ”: A NGLOM A NI A A ND A NGLOPHILI A

In taking “Victorian” England as an important source and referent for his developing sense of the “Modern,” was Baudelaire quixotic or just contemporary? Although far from uniformly expressed as a “poetic mirror,” Baudelaire’s association of the new, the foreign, and modern with what we have come to understand as the Victorian was far from maverick or counterintuitive in its own day. Midcentury critics such as Gautier and Baudelaire had a rich journalistic and critical context for projecting the new and modern on their contemporaries across the channel. Indeed, Salines references an “anglomania” that overtakes French letters in the 1830s and 1840s, and in her 1939 study La Revue britannique: Son Histoire et son action littéraire (1825–1840), Kathleen Jones provides a sustained examination of one instance of this “cross-Channel” exchange. This book details the interests and workings of a monthly periodical devoted to translations of British review and magazine articles, and I reprise here some of its research and conclusions both for their illustrative detail and for several instructive ironies, which together do much to shed light on how English and Englishness signify in France at midcentury. Jones writes of an era of translation, particularly of English literature, an era of English intellectual influence not only on French novels, poetry, and theater, but on periodical literature as well. As Jones sets out to explain why “the French sought their opinions on the other side of the Channel,” she traces this interest in translating periodical literature to France’s sense that it had no review equal in stature, scope, and influence to, say, The Edinburgh Review.14 Although many such reviews were launched, none succeeded in the long term; hence, part of the thinking behind La Revue britannique was to make the successful English models available in French for imitation.15 For a review dedicated to holding a “faithful mirror” to English culture broadly conceived, however—editorial interests focused on political, financial, legal, and industrial developments with literature coming somewhere near the bottom of a long list16 —it is ironic that the first translation devoted to a literary subject would be a review article



miroir de l’esprit anglais” (oriental splendors reflected in the poetic mirror of the English spirit).13 Thus in addition to considering what translation and appropriation might mean in and of themselves, we must also pay close attention to the cultural valence of the source language, which may be just as significant as the specific source itself.

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of recent trends in French literature.17 In explanation, Jones speculates that the Revue britannique felt it needed to “define its position with regard to French schools of poetry,” particularly in terms of the Romanticism-Classicism divide.18 Thus the Revue introduces English letters as apparently equally engaged in this prominent debate, and as paying particular attention to French poetry. The British view in question, however, is primarily an indictment of French formalism. It likens French poetry to French gardens (it aims similarly to tame and improve the realm of letters) and to French fashion (it similarly deforms the “body” for the sake of appearance), charging that French literature consistently values the superficial over the essential. The French translation, however, omits the bulk of these strictures by means of cuts that editorial convention would suggest indicate a technical or arcane passage.19 Nonetheless, the essay’s ultimate judgment in favor of English poetry for its greater “force of imagination” comes through clearly enough even in the truncated translation that, though omitting some cattiness, includes strong, sweeping indictments: “La poésie française manque en général d’originalité, d’invention, de sublimité et de vigueur.”20 (French poetry in general lacks originality, invention, sublimity, and vigor.) This softened translation, Jones argues, establishes the “doctrines” that will characterize the Revue’s literary outlook for many years: “the unseating of classical antiquity . . . , faith in what they understand as the modern era, utilitarianism, the social purpose of poetry, and a mistrust of any liberties taken with language.”21 The Edinburgh reviewer recommends to French poets that they be “useful” and also “respectful of the language of Racine,” uniting “progressive” British utilitarian ethos with a flattering respect for French linguistic purity, the implication being that France could take ideological cues from the British without sullying its language.22 Other cross-Channel ironies abound, however, that question the likelihood of retaining such linguistic isolation. An early series appearing in the Revue was the Esquisses de la littérature et de la société parisiennes, translated from the New Monthly Magazine. The Revue britannique published this series apparently ignorant that it was originally written by Stendhal, who supplemented his income by publishing review articles in England.23 Market forces had long narrowed “Literary Channel.”24 Jones contextualizes the success of the Revue in terms of a general atmosphere of intellectual “anglomania” that ceded to English poets the same greater force of imagination that the English claimed for themselves.25 The Revue thus entered as an informant on a popular vogue already well-established. In the French press’s reaction to the



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Revue, politics predict: the Globe, an influential opposition journal, commends the “utility” of such a project, since “[p]lacée aujourd’hui à la tête de la civilization, l’Angleterre est un modèle et un guide” (“in its current place at the head of the civilized world, England is a model and a guide”); conservative papers, conversely, preferred to ignore it.26 Complex as these interrelations and their politics may be, the sense of “Victorian” England as a harbinger of the modern emerges fairly intact. It is in this overall context, then, that we should consider the uses Baudelaire made of English in his own writings. To clarify the extent of this use: in addition to the commentary on Poe and the limited references to Hood I discuss in the subsequent section, Baudelaire’s critical writings make intermittent reference to the British tradition in the novel—Sterne, Goldsmith, Godwin, Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton; in poetry—Byron, Tennyson; and in the visual arts—Hogarth, Hook, Reynolds, Millais, Holman Hunt, William Morris.27 Of these, several reward more sustained attention with regard to the prose poem project. The first is from an unpublished essay fragment “Puisque réalisme il y a,” which Jacques Crépet has dated to 1855, the same year of the “Exposition Universelle” essay I have taken as central (chapter 1).28 Written in response to an open letter his once close friend Champfleury had written to George Sand, Baudelaire’s tempestuous fragment contrasts literary realism with the pictorial realism he associates with Courbet. This cluster of characters and referents condenses a number of terms and relations that were highly charged for Baudelaire, all of which mark the most abstract literary and aesthetic terms as locally and personally inflected. First, the relationship with Champfleury was not a smooth one; second, the presence of Sand both as point of reference for literary realism and as addressee was unlikely to give rise to positive associations, given Baudelaire’s extreme distaste for his female contemporary (“Je ne puis penser à cette stupide créature, sans un certain frémissement d’horreur.” “I cannot think of this stupid creature without a certain shudder of horror”).29 “Realism” also carried associations of immorality, and on these grounds was often leveled as an accusation against Baudelaire’s own poetry.30 What is more, as a subject of realist painting himself in Courbet’s Atelier, also exhibited in 1855, Baudelaire felt Courbet had taken realism too far by depicting the poet at work watched over by his mulatto muse/mistress Jeanne Duval; the painting bears the subtitle “Allégorie réelle.”31 The essay fragment attests to all these anxieties, apparently tying the debate to a very localized frame of reference. It comes as a surprise, then, that in the midst of this overwrought and fragmentary discussion of the




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Mme Sand. [Hyppolite] Castille. (Champfleury en a eu peur.) Mais la badauderie est si grande. Dès lors, Réalisme,—villageois, malhonnête.

grossier,

et

même

rustre,

Champfleury, le poète . . . a un fond de farceur . . . –Regard à la Dickens, la table de nuit de l’amour. Si les choses se tiennent devant lui dans une allure quelque peu fantastique, c’est à cause de la contraction de son œil un peu myope. –Comme il étudie minutieusement, il croit saisir une réalité extérieure. Dès lors, réalisme,—il veut imposer ce qu’il croit son procédé. Cependant, if at all, si Réalisme a un sens—Discussion sérieuse. Tout bon poète fut toujours réaliste. Equation entre l’impression et l’expression.32 Mme Sand. Castille (Champfleury was afraid of him.) But there are throngs of rubbernecks. Thence . . . Realism—parochial, vulgar, even boorish, dishonest. Champfleury, the poet . . . has the essence of a farceur. . . .—Dickensian vision, the nightstand of love. If the things in his realm of vision seem to take on a kind of fantastic allure, it is caused by the contraction of his slightly myopic eye. Since he studies minutely, he believes he grasps an external reality. From this, realism—it wants to impose what it believes its process to be. However, if at all, if Realism has a sense—Serious discussion. Every good poet is always a realist. Equation between impression and expression.

The association with “la table de nuit de l’amour” is condescending, but it is also intimate, if not affectionate. Exactly what connects Champfleury as poet, Charles Dickens, and a nightstand is admittedly far from clear, but the juxtaposition injects a note of humor that seems welcome. Of great interest, furthermore, for the prose poems and their integration of particularized observation of external detail (soup, cords in distended flesh, shattering glass), the passage references an “allure fantastique,” so rendered by a distortion of vision. The prose poems record again and again the intrusion of closely observed but unyielding “external reality” on the “inner vision” of the poet. Here, realism results from a particular, particularly distorted vision turned on the observable details of the external world and taking this distortion for insight—a combination, then, or



relations between pictorial and literary French Realism in which personal prejudices and relationships so clearly color the writing, Charles Dickens appears almost as a welcome alternative:

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“equation” between observation and interpretation. Baudelaire also associates this peculiar perspective with foreign rather than French practitioners—Dickensian vision is intruding (earlier in the fragment, however, Champfleury was “diagnosed” with this myopia without a hint of a foreign origin). The notes for the unwritten article are fragmentary, associative. The segue to “serious discussion” occurs in opposition to Dickensian “myopia” but also follows from it by means of an English phrase—“Cependant, if at all.” If realism has a sense, this sense seems to merit a serious discussion only by way of English literature and even “if at all” by way of the English language—in Baudelaire’s own French text. An English context seems to clear the air of Baudelaire’s local, personal frustrations and prejudices. From a discussion of English prose (however myopic its vision), the “serious discussion” that does not take place nonetheless leads to the conclusion that all good poets (one would assume, including Baudelaire) are realists—although not, apparently, French realists. Another instance in which an English context gives rise to a discussion of new forms and modes of aesthetic creation comes not in a similarly obscure fragment but in the best-known and most influential of Baudelaire’s essays, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne.” Constantin Guys, the sketch artist the essay identifies as M. G. and with whom it is greatly concerned, had been employed by The Illustrated London News since 1843; hence what has been credited with the first articulation of an enduring modern aesthetic emerges under the sign of Victorian London, in reference to drawings depicting its streets or transposing international scenes for a British readership. Guys’ battlefield portraits, furthermore, bear titles jotted in English, which Baudelaire reproduces without translating: “Canrobert on the battle field of Inkermann. Taken on the spot”; “Myself at Inkermann”; “My humble self.”33 In the context of Baudelaire’s French essay, the English phrases accentuate rather than domesticate the exotic locales the images depict: “Schumla” “Scutari”; Balaklava, Constantinople. Baudelaire, furthermore, then casts these same images as illustrations of Tennyson: “voici l’historique charge de cavalerie chanté par la trompette héroique d’Alfred Tennyson, poète de la reine” (here we have the historic cavalry charge as sung by the heroic trumpet of Alfred Tennyson, poet to the Queen).34 Clearly, the modernity Baudelaire here evokes draws on the exotic and Eastern, a common enough gesture in French Romanticism; it draws also, however, on the British. In sum, Baudelaire’s figure of modernity is “fugitive” and in transition; it is transgressive, as I have argued, and it is also essentially




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transnational: Baudelaire has chosen as its emblem the figure of a French artist illustrating the world for a British daily. In a further twist, Baudelaire mentions Guys’ outrage at being named—“outed”—by Thackeray. The anonymous “man in the crowd” artist figure, stock character of the Baudelairean-Benjaminian modern, has his anonymity and stealthy potential violated and thus foregrounded by a senior British man of letters. Since Thackeray was much concerned with illustration and the image-word rapport, as Baudelaire mentions, and was also a Guys enthusiast, Baudelaire can claim a kind of common ground with the well-known novelist even as he acts to “foreground” Guys in a stealthier way (“M. G.”): the identity of the artist is not disclosed but bears the structure, for those in the know, of the open secret.35 This textual strategy that somewhat coyly withholds information while continually reminding readers of its absence resembles strategies I argue are employed in more subversive and central ways by Christina Rossetti. This instance in Baudelaire is tangential and itself fleeting, rendered remarkable in part because of the comparative context my own study establishes. More centrally, Baudelaire identifies a second key figure in his definition of modernity as the “Dandy,” a British import. Here, while the concept is opposed to the utilitarianism Baudelaire finds odious and which his culture frequently ascribed to England, he praises the more overt Dandyism of “nos voisins en Angleterre.” By contrast to the French, among whom “les dandys” only become more rare, the British “laisseront longtemps encore une place aux héritiers de Sheridan, de Brummel, et de Byron.” The British, again, are more extroverted, extravagant, and visible, while the French demur. Baudelaire uses British referents to help delineate his modern aesthetic in another important treatise, as well. In the Salon de 1859, Baudelaire cites with glowing enthusiasm the contributions of a range of British painters—including Pre-Raphaelites William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. He does not linger on them, certainly, but the essay does repeat word for word, in some cases, what he had written of them in his essay on Théophile Gautier.36 As Georges Blin has shown, furthermore, Gautier anticipates Baudelaire’s particular understanding of “modernity,” and does so specifically with respect to English painting. Blin cites two separate instances: “L’antiquité n’a rien à y voir. Un tableau anglais est moderne comme un roman de Balzac, la civilization la plus avancé s’y lit jusque dans les moindres details . . .” (“Antiquity has no place there. An English painting is modern like a Balzac novel, the most advanced civilization legible there in the least details”).37 Like Baudelaire, Gautier draws on a parallel between verbal and visual art, in both cases focused on the depiction of minute



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particulars, observable details—and he does so with a cross-Channel reference, yoking the “translatio” of image-word with a further act of translation. With reference to the Pre-Raphaelites, furthermore, who often depicted archaic scenes and settings, the “modernity” of the work is clearly located more in the manner and mode of representation, in the kinds and level of detail observed and included, and less in the representation of fashion, which was such an important focus in “Peintre de la vie moderne.” Gautier goes even further in associating modernity with English painting, this time with specific reference to Mulready: il serait difficile de rattacher cet artiste à aucune école ancienne, car le caractère de la peinture anglaise est, comme nous l’avons dit, la modernité.—Le substantif existe-t-il? le sentiment qu’il exprime est si récent que le mot pourrait bien ne pas se trouver dans les dictionnaires.38 It would be difficult to associate this artist with any ancient school, for the character of English painting is, as we have said, modernity.— Does this substantive exist? The sentiment it expresses is so recent that the word could well not yet be found in dictionaries.

Again, “modernity,” this important concept that posterity has located in “Paris, capital of the nineteenth century,” makes its way to Baudelaire and even into the French lexicon, at least according to Gautier, by way of a complex cluster of referents drawn from Victorian England and America.

THE NEIGHBOR H OOD A BROA D What, then would become of it—this context—if transferred? if translated? Would it not rather be traduit (traduced) which is the French synonym, or overzezet (turned topsy turvy) which is the Dutch one? —Edgar Allan Poe.39

I offer the following all-but-forgotten incident, an allegory of recirculation, appropriation, and forgetting, as a kind of emblem of crossChannel proximity, influence, and obscurity. Even more than the contact and knowledge to which it testifies, its presence—or lack—in narratives of literary history represents the category not of the glance, as in Baudelaire’s “A une passante,” but of the glancing blow: a box of poems by the river, a bookmark, a poetics en passant.




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Baudelaire’s biographers recount that a box containing a volume of Thomas Hood’s poetry was found on the quais of Paris. The volume was bookmarked with a letter to Baudelaire bearing the instruction: “Faites circuler le livre.”40 The letter did not refer to the book on the quais that contained it, however. The letter appeared there accidentally, perhaps apocryphally, and certainly out of context. The text of the letter, which was addressed to Baudelaire from the novelist Ernest Feydeau, was, however, circulated, reprinted in the Petite Revue, a journal edited by Baudelaire’s friend Poulet-Malassis. In this narrative of minor novelists and their periodical publication, the Thomas Hood volume figures as a letter holder, rather than the letter serving as a bookmark. As it happens, Feydeau’s misplaced letter and its publication fate have little to do with my project; I want to take from it only its directive to circulate a text and this is thanks only to its curious appearance in a strange context: a French letter transposed, transferred, and sandwiched between forgotten English poems, a placeholder, evidence of another writer’s reading habits. The ultimate fate of that particular Thomas Hood volume, despite its contribution to making a forgotten letter perform its own directive and circulate, remains unknown. This volume, the fact of it, and its interruption, abandonment, and recirculation by French letters (in a double sense) frames a series of questions. Such questions include but also surpass the straightforward variety—what was Baudelaire getting out of Hood? Where did an interest in Hood come from? Such traditional questions are clearly of interest, but I have others in mind. These questions echo Poe’s remarks about “it—this context” and the apparent problems of translation and transposition. Poe’s worry actually applies to his own marginalia, removed from the “context” of the texts they comment on to be published as text in their own right; no interlinguistic translation is even referenced. But taken out of context, as it almost begs to be, the passage must also beg the question: what is “it”? What is getting transposed, transferred, traduced—here, in the series of literary transactions that have left traces in addition to a box of books on the quais? What gets lost and found? One of the things that has been lost, certainly, is the precise identity of the volume that was found. The Hood volume in question may have contained his famous poem “The Bridge of Sighs,” a text that presents a woman’s corpse that was, as we see it in the poem, also apparently left by the water’s edge to be read, transposed, and circulated. A line from this poem—“Anywhere out of the world!”— was then circulated by Baudelaire as the title of his prose poem “Any Where Out of the World,” which, unlike its title, is written in



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French. Baudelaire took these words out of context in more than this strictly linguistic sense, since in Hood’s poem these are the words with which the woman in question leaves the world—and the bridge (if not the quai)—whereas Baudelaire gives no indication of Hood, bridge, or corpse, although he clearly knew the poem, having translated it—his last act of literary translation, a swan song translated as a translator’s swan’s song. Despite the pleasing continuities suggested by reading and circulating texts and bodies left near water, Baudelaire had first likely encountered Hood’s poem, however, not in the book left on the quais, but in circulation elsewhere in another context. In fact, the poem’s circulation was at this point great indeed, if we count in physical terms the circuitous transatlantic by via which it ultimately crossed the Channel—that is, how this particular English poem found its French reader, translator, and traducer: via Poe. Poe quotes Hood’s poem in its entirety in his essay “The Poetic Principle,” where he praises it for embodying his ideals of “pathos” and “versification.” No context could have introduced Hood in more favorable a light, and Poe recommends Hood in the highest terms: “One of the noblest—and, speaking of Fancy—one of the most singularly fanciful of modern poets, was Thomas Hood.”41 Baudelaire was greatly influenced by this essay, showing this influence by incorporating much of it, translated but otherwise little altered, into his own writings: transposed and in a new context. In the passage with which I began this section, Poe links the acts of translation and transposition, of wresting material from one context and planting it in another—by means of the pun that somehow straddles these acts and, in Poe’s sentence, straddles three languages. Transposition and translation, overturning and betrayal mark the compositional, linguistic, and narrative trajectories of “Any Where Out of the World,” and indeed, much of Baudelaire’s practice in the prose poems turns on such processes. But, as I have argued in chapter 1, despite Baudelaire’s near-obsessive devotion to his American predecessor, the transgression involved in the prose poem genre is often a betrayal of precisely Poe’s poetic ideals, versification and pathos, ideals he identifies, furthermore, particularly in relation to Thomas Hood.42 In the prose poem, of course, versification is abandoned. Pathos is flattened, emptied, turned on its head—often by placing it in a new linguistic, social, and generic context: journalistic idiom, argot, explicit yet mundane vulgarity and violence. In “Any Where Out of the World,” these acts are committed against, or to, the Hood poem lionized by Poe.




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One more Unfortunate Weary of breath, Rashly importunate, Gone to her death! (1–4) 43

Initially the woman in question appears as only one of a large category—that of abandoned fallen women who have drowned themselves, a category that had a great deal of cultural if not strictly factual currency, as I discuss in the following chapter. But where in “Passing Strange,” I situate Christina Rossetti’s “female corpse” poems in a broader tradition of representations of female death, of which I see Hood’s text as an extreme and (then) highly familiar example, here I attempt—initially, at least—to view the poem out of context, “traduced” as Poe would have it; that is, in a Baudelairean context, inflected by Poe. Indeed, however, no historical knowledge is required to establish the category of the drowned fallen woman; the text does that succinctly with the words “one more,” but despite the broad, almost abstract quality that supplies and introduces its subject’s identity, the text soon focuses on observed, material particulars of the kind Baudelaire values. It draws attention to body contours and complexion and finally to the clothing that accentuates them, to the “garments/ Clinging” (9–10) as the “wave constantly/ Drips from her clothing” (11–12). This lingering guided tour of the female corpse ends with the exhortation that we “Take her up instantly” (13), and “Touch her” (15). Despite this contact, and despite the fact that “Death has left on her/ Only the beautiful” (25–26), we are told to “Make no deep scrutiny/ Into her mutiny” (21–22)—lest we discover any sordid detail, perhaps. Hood’s speaker indeed rejects sullying particularity and even seems to celebrate death for leaving “only the beautiful.” In a Baudelairean context, this stance seems to align the aesthetics of the poem with the understanding of beauty as deathlike perfection, with the model espoused and ironized by the sonnet “La Beauté,” and away from the “fallen” and temporalized beauty more generally enacted and valorized in the prose poems.44 Hood’s dead woman, furthermore, acts as a muse of sorts, a role more typical of the verse poems than the prose, although with an interesting distinction. “She” does not speak and is spoken for, unlike the interrupting or intruding women of the prose poems and the fallen materiality they often represent. Her materiality, however, in the sense



Thomas Hood’s poem reads in a young woman’s corpse the complete narrative of her suicide. It begins:

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of the unpleasant materiality of the actual dead body, threatens to intrude on the romanticizing vision the poem seems to advance. In a move potentially kindred to Baudelaire’s implication of the reader in his transgressive texts, Hood’s readers are even urged to take an active role in rendering the corpse more aesthetically palatable: the poem tells us to “[w]ipe those poor lips of hers/ Oozing so clammily” (29–30) and “[l]oop up her tresses/ Escaped from the comb” (27–28). These lines, of course, belie the action they exhort us to perform and include the unbeautiful details death supposedly has effaced. By means of these lines, however, we see death arranged aesthetically by the poet and reader, as both are transformed into viewers and readers of a lifeless form that is at once beautiful and instantly comprehensible. Read in this light, the poem becomes a starkly gendered allegory for the kind of classical aesthetic Baudelaire at once valorizes and attacks. In addition to aesthetic experience, the sight of this beautiful corpse also generates a complete narrative history: the story of sexual fall, abandonment, and death is so obvious and universal that the woman’s projected past is not even “hers” but “life’s history” (67), and the woman eagerly throws herself “Anywhere, anywhere,/Out of the world” (70–71). With these dying words, the young woman plunges to her death, but the poem suggests no source for these details about her mode of death or its verbal accompaniment other than the very fact of the woman’s corpse. It requires only to be read. And yet there was such a source—a source that would have been instantly recognizable for many of Hood’s contemporary readers, although we have no way of assessing Baudelaire’s familiarity with it. Indeed, if the poem is remarkable for details the speaker reads into and urges us to efface from the corpse, it is equally remarkable for the way it effaces all details of its actual inspiration: the attempted suicide/murder of a middle-aged seamstress, Mary Furley, and her eighteen-month-old baby. The difference between this incident and Hood’s romanticizing depiction is quite stark. Unlike Hood’s poetic subject, Mary Furley survived—she was saved, but showed little gratitude, arguing at her trial that “death would have been a happy release to her, and she very much regretted that she had been rescued from a situation which must in a few moments have terminated her earthly sufferings.”45 Her son did not survive; she was tried for murder and sentenced to death, a sentence commuted to deportation after public outcry, particularly taking the form of letters to the editor. Hood thus substitutes youth for middle age, sexual “fall” and abandonment for grinding workhouse poverty, and effaces the complications




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of motherhood and infanticide altogether, all of which were covered extensively in the London press. The readers might supply them; they need not sully the poem. Hood even—in a move I make considerably more of in my subsequent treatment of the cult of female death— substitutes death for her life, knowing the former will be more aesthetically appealing and offer less interference. Hood’s poem is a genuine (I believe) and quite successful attempt to generate sympathy for the plight of women in poverty and advance a critique of the pervasive sexual double standard. He addresses explicitly the “dissolute man” who might have enjoyed the favors of a “fallen woman” but who would not have ended up jumping in the river himself because of it. Despite Hood’s good intentions, however, the poem is also a near perfect rehearsal of the kind of representational moves frequently critiqued in discussions of “aesthetic ideology” and even of narrative as such: the particular story of Mary Furley is sacrificed to the universal, or “Life’s” history; the social, material history of labor inequity and poverty is sacrificed to the “universal” story of “stained” honor and failed romance. In the poem, the aesthetic image and narrative of the death is set and any details not conforming to it are to be ignored, covered, or actively erased. These details are subsumed by the commonplace interchange between the literal and metaphoric at the nexus of the “fall”—the woman’s literal “fall” from the bridge presuming a metaphoric “fall” from sexual innocence, and concrete, material death presuming sexual death, or “death by female orgasm,” as the suicide’s cause and plunging, climactic watery quality of that death suggests. How does Baudelaire, then, come from this poem to the prose poem, a genre he places at odds with the kind of totalizing, romanticizing aesthetic and narrative Hood’s poem presents? It hardly seems to be via Hood, because “Any Where out of the World” in turn effaces all trace of woman and suicide, transposing the earlier male writer’s fantasy of a dying woman’s last words into the exasperated plea of the persona’s own world-weary soul. In the body of this text, the line from Hood appears translated into French, leaving the English title “out of the world” of the poem—the world of French—as both an import and an exile. The exile of the female corpse, meanwhile, is even more complete—first sexualized, sanitized, and abandoned in poetry by Hood, the corpse is then abandoned by poetry itself, as Baudelaire co-opts her already ventriloquized words, excerpting, exiling, and then translating them. “What, then would become of it—this context—if transferred? if translated? Would it not rather be traduit (traduced)?” Apparently so. The exchange of aestheticizing,



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romanticizing sentiment for alienation, world- weariness, and disjunction seems a fairly pat summary of the transition from the Victorian to the Modern, the Victorian serving as a kind of lesser ghost source for the new bold forms of the new era—of which the prose poem, undoubtedly, is one. “Anywhere Out of the World” goes on to be a rallying cry for the Baudelaire-inspired modern, and the phrase’s original context goes on to be thoroughly forgotten, along with its author. Yet the Baudelaire-Hood story does not end there—or rather, it did not begin there. It goes beyond simply supplying the English title for a French poem and leaving the poem’s female corpse and its perhaps still-living source even further behind. To begin with, it is clear that Baudelaire read enough Hood to know that satire, rather than sentiment, was his more accustomed mode of discourse. In fact, Baudelaire seems to have taken Thomas Hood’s humorous writings quite seriously.46 He proposed a section devoted to Hood in an early prospectus of his essay on caricature, and his Carnet indicates plans to write a study devoted entirely to Hood, although neither of these projects came to fruition.47 Clearly, then, the humorous side of Hood, though not much in evidence in “The Bridge of Sighs,” was of theoretical importance to Baudelaire. As anyone even remotely familiar with a broader sample of Hood’s corpus would recognize, furthermore, at the heart of this humorous side was the pun. Thomas Hood developed punning into an art—or at least into an impressive form of pathology, proclaiming on his deathbed, for example, that he was “dying to please the undertaker, so that he could urn a lively Hood.”48 This punning was not by any means the element of Hood’s work singled out for praise by Poe, Baudelaire’s idol. In fact, in an 1845 review, Poe disparaged Hood’s punning, and in “The Poetic Principle” he valorizes the “pathos” and “versification” of “The Bridge of Sighs,” qualities that seem actually at odds with the punning humor for which Hood was otherwise known.49 Since Baudelaire makes a practice of violating his ideals of poetry—ideals heavily influenced by Poe—in developing his prose poems, we might argue that he could embrace the punning Hood in a double act of violation and homage to Poe, just as transposing Hood’s line might be a double act of homage and betrayal. But we need not resort to this kind of contrarianism to redeem the pun for Baudelaire as a devotée of Poe, because Poe does not condemn the pun entirely. He first offers this grudging praise in a review of Hood: “[w]hatever merit may be accidentally discovered in a pun, arises altogether from its unexpectedness.”50 In the same brief commentary, furthermore, Poe




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praises one variety of Hood’s humor as the basis of his “greatness”: specifically, “a very rare and ethereal class of humor in which the mere pun was left altogether out of sight, or took on the character of the richest grotesque.”51 This “richest grotesque” is generated by the pun, which may also generate “rare and ethereal” effects if it is “left altogether out of sight.” With this caveat about the way in which a pun can lead to greatness in mind, I turn to the apparently unrelated prose poem “La Corde.” “La Corde” was published in the newspaper Le Figaro, dedicated to Edouard Manet—another problematic dedicatory “gift” since the poem was inspired by an actual event from the painter’s life, the suicide of his boy model.52 Thus, like Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs,” Baudelaire’s prose piece finds its source in the death of a child by suicide. Baudelaire’s text, however, concerns a boy’s own suicide, and the boy and his corpse remain at the center of the poem, unlike the corpse of Mary Furley’s son in Hood’s treatment of that murderfailed suicide. Another significant departure from Hood, ironically, marks a return to the English poet’s source: unlike Hood’s poem but very much like the morbid interest of the London news accounts that inspired it, “La Corde” focuses on a mother’s relationship to her dead child and in particular on how that mother-child relationship is deformed by economics. That is: while it is perfectly possible to find that this demystification and deformation itself mystifies the selfdelusion of the painter, the evocation of the mother-child relationship in Baudelaire can hardly be neutral.53 “La Corde” certainly declares as its moral or core lesson the exposure of the most widely held ideals: mother-love: “S’il existe un phénomène évident, trivial, toujours semblable . . . c’est l’amour maternel.”54 (If there is one phenomenon that is obvious, trivial, always the same, unmistakable in nature, it is motherly love.) The narrative goes on to tell the tale (ostensibly) of how the speaker, a painter, is disabused of his illusions about mother-love through the suicide of his boy model.55 Taken with the boy’s beauty, the painter took the boy in to live with him, dressed him in various costumes, painted him, and fed him chocolates and liqueurs. The boy had too much appetite for these things; he grew depressed and unruly, and the painter threatened to turn him out, precipitating, apparently, his death. As Marcia Scott observes, “the greatest indictment of the painter’s perceptive skills is the fact that he does not recognize the depths of the boy’s despair” when he leaves him alone, a failure rendered doubly ironic by the narrator’s insistence on the particular “attentiveness” his profession as painter compels.56



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Thus even before we get to the interesting question of motherlove, we see that illusions operate on a number of levels throughout the poem. The painter/narrator believes his illusions (about mothers) have been unmasked, but his own narrative reveals his continuing illusions about himself: he never considers the social or emotional consequences of transplanting the boy from one life to another with the same ease that he changes the boy’s costumes or shifts his image from one canvas to another. The boy is material for the painter, fascinating in his ability to be “transformed” by costume and transposed onto canvas. In fact, any insight into the boy’s inner life might interfere with this transmutability, and so it is precisely his idiosyncratic behavior, his “crises singulières de tristesse précoce” (“singular crises of precocious sorrow”) that prompt the painter to threaten his removal. These “crises singulières,” furthermore, recall the kinds of unsettling “details” of subjectivity that Hood’s speaker encouraged his listeners to ignore. The nature of this “medium,” however, the materiality of the boy, is brought to the painter’s attention only when, to his surprise, he sees on his return home, his “petit bonhomme,” as he says, “pendu au panneau de cette armoire” (“hung from a panel on this wardrobe”). He describes the corpse at some length, focusing on his “répugnance inexplicable à le faire brusquement tomber sur le sol. Il fallait le soutenir tout entier avec une bras et, avec la main de l’autre bras, couper la corde” (“inexplicable reluctance to let him fall quickly to the floor. I had to support him entirely with one arm and cut the rope with my other hand”). He must also dig the cord out from his former model’s neck: “il fallait maintenant, avec de minces ciseaux, chercher la corde entre les deux bourrelets de l’enflure, pour lui dégager le cou”57 (“to free his neck I had to dig around with tiny scissors, prying the rope from between two swollen folds of flesh”). As the painter investigates new aspects of his artistic material, however, the writing also wakes up, and the clichéd, “automatized,” and sanitized version of the boy (“mon petit bonhomme,” etc.) gives way to the more vivid, physical, literal language above. The corpse of the boy “defamiliarizes” language in the same way that death has “defamiliarized” the body of the boy: both are unexpected and somewhat grotesque. They share the merit, here, that Poe finds in the pun. How to get from corpse to pun? The prose poems repeatedly—as first theorized by Barbara Johnson—stress the inclusion of ironic, temporal, metonymic material that poetry of the “pure” variety traditionally elides. And here, the habitually aestheticizing painter’s attempt at “cushioning the blow” for his model’s corpse only brings him into closer contact with the fleshly material of the boy’s dead




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body. As you might say, “a rope is a bad Cordon Sanitaire.” You might say this, and if you were Thomas Hood, you would have, and, in fact, you did, in an essay Poe cites in his review as an example of a more “meritorious” pun.58 Thus Baudelaire’s prose poem partakes of the “rare,” “ethereal,” and “grotesque” humor that Poe contends can be generated by hidden puns. Baudelaire’s pun is multiply hidden, and multiply duplicitous: it isn’t his, but, like the title of “Any Where Out of the World,” is lifted from Hood—or rather, lifted from Poe who lifts it from Hood. It is in circulation. Second, it relies on a play not just in language but between languages; and third, it appears nowhere in the poem, it merely haunts at it as the son of Mary Furley haunts Hood. The pun, once we start thinking along these lines, does not stop there—the second cord to be cut is, of course, the umbilical cord, or “cordon umbilicale”—the “tie that binds.” It is in this light that the painter understands the mother’s request for the cord with which her child hanged himself, a request the painter naturally interprets in the standard emotive language of mother-love, translating even her silence into the comforting truism “ ‘Les douleurs les plus terribles sont les douleurs muettes” (The most terrible sorrows are mute.)59 But just as the literal “corde” was cut with scissors, this metaphoric cord, or the illusion of it, is cut with paper, for the next day, texts arrive that offer an alternate explanation. The letters, all with the same intent—“c’est-à-dire à obtenir de moi un morceau de la funeste et béatifique corde” (that is, to get from me a piece of that mortal and beatific rope). She’s been selling “la corde” for a profit. The poem itself does not escape the cycle of demystification to which it apparently sets out to subject mother-love—nor, of course, does the painter, nor especially the poet. Marcia Scott rightly questions the “traditional association of the painter-narrator with the poet” but uses this split to suggest that Baudelaire “exposes” the painter’s delusional exposure of the mother as in fact covering his own blindness. The irony such a reading misses, however, is that of the “mise-en-abyme”: a structure suggested, as Christopher Prendergast argues, by the striking “parallel between the manner of the narrator and that of the characters”—after all, as Prendergast is right to emphasize, the manner and tone of narration is so crucial in the prose poem.60 If we are to understand, therefore, the poet-frame narrator as affording a perspective distinct from that of the poet, then a similar dissociation may be inferred between that “speaker” and Baudelaire. By a similar extension, each observer and narrator believes himself to have the authentic perception that exposes the delusion of others, a belief which, though valid, also plays a



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double role, at once paralleling and deflecting a delusion about his own position. This continues to replicate outside the narrative frame. For instance, the only work of art in which we actually see the boy’s image incorporated is the poem itself. As Jacques Derrida argues of another prose poem, “La Fausse Monnaie”: Everything that will be said, in the story, of counterfeit money (and in the story of counterfeit money) can be said of the story, of the fictive text bearing this title. The text is also the coin, a piece of counterfeit money provoking an event and leading itself to this whole scene of deception, gift, forgiveness or non-forgiveness.61

The same logic holds true of “La Corde,” a poem in which a mother violates apparent laws of nature by looking to sell pieces of a “corde” that had strangled her son in order to profit from the curiosity and superstition of her neighbors. The poet, in turn, sells his poem “La Corde” to the newspapers to meet the demands of a variously literate readership that it might share with publications such as Moniteur des cordonniers, the journal of bootmakers for which Baudelaire had been recently commissioned to write a piece on aesthetics. Worse yet, however, Baudelaire published “La Corde” in Le Figaro, the paper that began the obscenity trial that led to the suppression of several poems (among them, ironically, “Femmes damnées”). Thus Baudelaire, like the mother in his text, sells “La Corde” for a profit. Derrida argues for a privileged status of the particular title “Counterfeit money” since fiction may be said to be a kind of “counterfeit”—especially in where, as in “La Corde,” “[t]he fictive narrative is put forward as nonfictive, supposedly [soi-disant] by a fictive narrator, that is, one who claims not to be fictive, in the fiction signed by Baudelaire.”62 And, furthermore, by appearing in Le Figaro, the actual material manifestation of “La Corde” will be as pieces of “the rope” (or at least the paper) that “strangled” Baudelaire’s poetic “children.” Alternately, or cutting differently, as Jared Stark suggests we identify Baudelaire the poet with the child suicide himself arguing that in “cutting himself, the fils (son) becomes the fil (thread, cord), which preserves his identity only in the form of the cut.”63 The confusion of fiction/nonfiction status is amplified by the dedication to Manet and also by the imagery associated with the prose poems’ structure by the “Dédicace.” Cut-up snakes are not so different from cut-up cords, and both serve as commodities.64 Just as Derrida has asked, “What is one doing when one dedicates a serpent—a whole




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serpent or in segments?” we must also ask what one is doing when one dedicates a “Corde”? To what particular part, furthermore, of the “corde” or of “La Corde” does the dedication refer? simply the whole, the prose poem? or does it imitate the “gift” of “la corde” that the texts represent, the severed segments of the hangman’s rope that popular superstition believes would bring good luck?65 And is it, then, the “rope” by which the painter/friend, Édouard Manet, “hung” (the canvas of) his boy, or a reference to the real rope that really hanged the boy model of the painter who receives the dedication? “La Corde” thus nastily straddles the rupture between the fictive, the counterfeit (of painting, of aesthetics, of fiction), and the real. It announces itself (generically, and by purporting to be authored by a painter when signed by Baudelaire) as fiction, but then dedicates itself to a (real) painter who has suffered something like the (fictive? real?) events recounted. There is no sign of any “quarantine zone” to prevent all this unfortunate violation of the boundary between fictive and real that we—much like a glazier—might wish to maintain. In one way, Baudelaire’s poem reverses the sanitizing action of Thomas Hood’s elision of a child’s corpse and his erasure of the unromantic details of infanticide and workhouse poverty, efforts signaled in the poem by the attempt to beautify and cover the unpleasant bodiliness of death. It is precisely the kind of literal details that Hood enjoins the reader to help in tidying that “La Corde” pushes with insistence—although Hood’s poem actually does include graphic details of the physical corpse and emphasizes the role of the romanticizing, aestheticizing gaze in tidying them away. Rather than moving between the metaphoric and literal, however, maintaining and contrasting the distinction between the two modes, “La Corde” draws on the kind of violent fusion of literal and metaphoric representation that we see developed and expanded upon in prose poems such as “Le Gâteau” and “Le Mauvais vitrier.” The aestheticization of the working poor as practiced (and possibly critiqued) by Hood further suggests precisely the kind of violence that Baudelaire’s prose poems both engage in and critique. In addition to representational and lexical violence, Baudelaire turns to the hidden pun to disrupt the kind of aesthetic representation that he believed to be tired and “antimodern,” even as he (alternately) espoused and embraced it. In this, we have the very essence of the prose poem. It is a kind of betrayal, a transposition, a reintroduction of context, a turning on its head of poetics and aesthetics: Let’s beat up the poem. The extra-mediated and delayed effect of the interlinguistic pun, however, is less a dramatically violent rupture and more like a low rumbling. It is a site



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of interlinguistic contact and overlap that allows the tension always building between subterranean linguistic plates to palpably reach the surface without leveling the distinct cultural edifices constructed there—only weakening their foundations, perhaps for later collapse. Baudelaire’s “persistent anglophilia,” then, in leading to Poe’s ideal of the “hidden pun,” participates in a transgressive poetics that comes closer to the poetics of stealth I discuss at length with regard to “Christina Rossetti’s Unusual Dead.”

E N PASSA NT : THE NEIGHBOR H OOD; A B ROA D (A TR A NSITION) Allons plus loin encore, à l’extrême bout de la Baltique; encore plus loin de la vie, si c’est possible; installons-nous au pôle. Là le soleil ne frise qu’obliquement la terre, et les lentes alternatives de la lumière et de la nuit suppriment la variété et augmentent la monotonie, cette moitié du néant . . . Là, nous pourrons prendre de longs bains de ténèbres cependant que, pour nous divertir, les aurores boréales nous enverrons de temps en temps leurs gerbes roses, comme des reflets d’un feu d’artifice de l’enfer! Enfin, mon âme fait explosion et sagement elle me crie: “N’importe où! N’importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!” Then let’s go farther still, to the far point of the Baltic, if possible, farther than life; we’ll set ourselves up at the pole, where the sun only obliquely glances off the earth, where slow alternations of light and night suppress variety and augment the monotony that is halfway to nothingness. . . . There, we can bathe at length in shadows while for our diversion, from time to time, the aurora borealis will send up its rose-colored spray, reflections of the fireworks of hell. At last, my soul exploded and wearily cried, “Anywhere! Anywhere! As long as it’s out of this world.” —Charles Baudelaire, 1867 To be couched with the beast in its torrid lair, Or drifting on ice with the polar bear, With the weaver at work at his quiet loom; Anywhere, anywhere, out of this room! —Dora Greenwell, 1867

Whatever Baudelaire’s enthusiasms for and projections on AngloAmerican letters were, it is clear none of them included, or would ever have included, the work of his contemporary Dora Greenwell. If




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Baudelaire liked very well to explore the poetic by means of female characters, corpses, sexuality, and fashion choices, these enthusiasms did not extend to exploring women’s relation to the poetic by means of their poetry. Indeed, any exaggerated preconceptions readers might have about Baudelaire’s misogyny clearly are likely to fall short of the mark—his vitriolic hatred of George Sand would have been unlikely to be mitigated had she been writing verse instead of prose. In part for this reason, it is one of the more delicate ironies the chronology of this period has to offer that the project of Baudelaire’s famous poetic “swan song” (this posthumously published poem that yearns for death) should be so closely replicated by a devout spinster poetess. Like the poetic and social contexts that produced them, the texts that result from transposing Hood’s line are very different. The texts that share the year of publication were written independently, in utter lack of knowledge of the other, by poets of the same age, each of whom was inspired to respond to Hood’s ventriloquized dying cry of a fallen woman—to transform and transpose the line without any reference to its source. The juxtaposition yields some unexpected similarities, while the bare fact that two poets from such different backgrounds respond poetically to the same text reminds us of the chronology and frame of reference shared by nineteenth-century writers only subsequently understood as “Victorian” or “Modern.” This coincidence, however, by its very commonalities, underscores stark differences between French and British and male and female cultural and prosodic expectations—while leaving as an open question which gulf is more profound and divisive. Greenwell’s “A Scherzo (A Shy Person’s Wishes)” recasts the line to a very different end, transposing the plight of Hood’s fallen woman and her exclusion from the Victorian home to voice the anguish of one immured within that home’s figural and literal walls. Interestingly, the progression of related locations parallels the structural logic of Baudelaire’s list of increasingly faraway lands. For each poet, the “anywhere” culmination seems to demand a path that considers all the potential places of escape and, in a more remarkable parallel, both envision the frozen north as the final physical location—a detail remarkable not for its originality (it is hardly unusual to imagine the north as the last frontier, particularly after Frankenstein) but for its inclusion in Baudelaire the nature hater’s fantasy. Baudelaire’s text, it seems, exhausts all the possibilities of the urban world before latching on to the hope of exotic lights and ultimate solitude; Greenwell envisions only natural escapes from what we come to recognize only in the very last line as a social and domestic enclosure.



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The last fantasy of escape was the same. What they were escaping, however, was very different. Greenwell and Baudelaire were born in 1821; in 1867, they each published a poem in response to Thomas Hood—but there, the biographical similarities seem to end. For Baudelaire, life was a series of bustling cafés, editorial offices, salons, and street scenes in which he might come and go as and when he pleased, while his own living quarters were solitary, usually squalid (judging even solely on the evidence of his prose poetry) and constrained more by finance than by any other factor. Nonetheless, in their confines he might find a solitude sometimes interrupted by mistresses and creditors but very infrequently by any rigorous formal social calls and duties. Baudelaire’s relationship to his mother was important and lifedefining—as was Greenwell’s, but in very different ways. Baudelaire’s correspondence with Mme Aupick is dominated by urgent pleas or less pleasant demands for money, although he also shared his literary projects and accomplishments; Mme Aupick had (fortunately for her) other sources of support. Neither married, but while Baudelaire was a bachelor, Greenwell was a spinster—a characterization and situation whose confines she did much to define and challenge publicly in her well-known essay “Our Single Women.” Activities like nursing ill parents, housekeeping for unmarried relatives, and teaching school have played little part in defining the nineteenth-century modern, and it should be noted that Greenwell’s status as an unmarried, middle-class woman in good social standing in Victorian England effectively excludes her from some kinds of urban experiences—fugitive encounters, latenight drinking, slumming, and open sexual relationships—by which, via Baudelaire, we have understood the modern. Greenwell herself was never well, judging from her correspondence, but she nonetheless spent much of her life nursing ailing parents. When financial difficulties obliged her family to give up their ancestral home, the twenty-seven-year-old Greenwell moved with her parents to one village rectory where they lived for two years until, following a period of some uncertainty, they resettled to another. There she taught Sunday school “delivering,” despite poor health, “. . . awful homilies on morals and manners” by her own account—until her brother was forced to resign because of his poor health.66 She then moved to Durham, where she nursed her near-completely incapacitated mother until her death, whereupon Greenwell moved to London and lived alone there until illness obliged her, once again, to resettle with family. In London, she enjoyed the active intellectual intercourse earlier available only in




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books and letters and still largely limited to tea- and dinner-parties in her rooms. Not that she had previously spent much time alone; social and filial duties kept her busy and indeed led her—like many a contemporary, Christina Rossetti among them—to embrace her physical illness as a kind of relief. The strict demands of social forms and the respite bodily illness might offer are reflected everywhere in Greenwell’s letters. Her correspondence abounds with excuses for not corresponding. Writing tires her; this is the reason that “keeps her silent”; she finds herself “obliged to draw my correspondence within very narrow limits.”67 One such letter in particular takes us almost directly to the territory of “A Scherzo”: “I have been very ill since I had your last letter” she begins, “. . . but I had felt so unwell for months . . . that to be ill obviously seemed a welcome relief.” The illness follows a period of “years” during which she felt a strange reluctancy and difficulty in answering all calls and claims, especially of a social kind—that I have longed day by day to find some little cave to run into and never to come out again! I thank God, since I have been ill, has given me exactly this cave very comfortably fitted up . . . you know a professed invalid has so many social immunities, which I mean to take full advantage of for the time being; . . . at present I feel intellectually very energetic, partly owing I think to having a great sense of leisure and freedom. [emphasis in original]68

Illness, then, provides a “comfortable cave”—an image that resonates with the imagery of “A Scherzo,” although roomier than the “innermost heart of a peach” that text first envisions. Before that discussion, however, it is worth examining some of the fruits of the intellectual “leisure and freedom” Greenwell’s bodily illness affords her. However narrowly she lived out her life in physical terms, intellectually her range was extraordinary. While it is true that Greenwell had less physical freedom than almost any man of her class, French or British, she could read broadly, and she had the languages to do so. Thomas Hood was thus not the only reading Greenwell and Baudelaire had in common; indeed, of the two contemporaries, Greenwell was arguably the more widely read, the more disciplined, and the more philosophically inclined. She was also, unsurprisingly, the more devout, a trait she shared with Christina Rossetti and also a trait that seems to remove much of her writing from the frame of reference associated with Baudelairean modernism. Her extensive reading and study, however, introduce the common ground that life circumstances could never have provided.



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Greenwell shares with Baudelaire a deep admiration of Victor Hugo, for example, although her enthusiasm is less complicated than Baudelaire’s. Greenwell footnoted her own poems and Hugo features prominently in these citations. Of course, the world read, and reads, Hugo, but this was less true of Arsène Houssaye, known best today as the recipient and first publisher of Baudelaire’s prose poetry, although he was a respected author and editor in his day. Nonetheless, he was hardly a household word in England, but Greenwell cites his biography of Da Vinci in her “Poet and Painter.” References to Hugo and Houssaye help Greenwell establish her intellectual and international credentials: she’s not just a piping bird, as her contemporaries tended to represent women poets, she knows French and has footnotes (rare in birdsong). Also a noted essayist, Greenwell published a biographical study of the French Catholic reformist Lacordaire; ironically, Baudelaire had considered a similar undertaking, but (as with so many of his projected essays) it was never completed. In another intriguing overlap, Greenwell was also accused of having presented translation as her own work in that study—an idea at which she bristles considerably, although, like Baudelaire, she was also a publishing translator. Greenwell in one respect was also ahead of Baudelaire in terms of poetic tastes; no modernist (or modernist scholar) asked to imagine the British intellectual on the cutting-edge of reception of new trends in French poetry—the critic or reader who, at midcentury, would be likely to know of Gérard de Nerval, whose fame in his own country was established only somewhat later—would conjure the image of Dora Greenwell, religious spinster poetess. In this, however, they would be mistaken. In 1871, Andrew Lang published an essay on Nerval that included a translation of the sonnet “El Desdichado,” but Greenwell alone among all her contemporaries seems to have written a poetic response, as Janet Gray establishes, in a collection published two years earlier.69 Gray acknowledges a common source in Scott; Greenwell, however, was absorbed in reading French at this time, as her footnotes attest. Greenwell’s “Desdichado” exhorts us to “weep not” for those who have lost loved ones (like the widower speaker in Nerval’s poem) but rather for those without the comfort of faith, who hear “no voice which says, my child,” a line Gray connects with Nerval’s epigraph to “Le Christ aux oliviers”: “Dieu est mort! Le ciel est vide . . . / Pleurez, enfants, vous n’avez plus de père.” (God is dead! The sky is empty . . . /Cry, children, you no longer have a father.)70 Shared images of stars, flowers, and empty tombs as well as the response to mourning and desolation amplify the connection and underscore concern for Nerval’s unsaved and “unconsoled” speaker. By contrast, Baudelaire’s




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first response to Nerval was rather less heartfelt: a lampoon in the early journalistic text “comment on paie les dettes,” although his response to Nerval’s death is more complimentary. Even this brief account makes it clear that however constrained her domestic life may have been—and “A Scherzo” suggests she felt it very constrained indeed—Greenwell’s life in letters allowed her a kind of cosmopolitan existence that escaped the confines of her spinsterhood. “Scherzo’s” complex logic evokes and condemns the limited sphere allowed for women—a state of affairs she also decried in “Our Single Women”—while demonstrating the potential for freedom inherent in the bounded yet more open space of the poem. Structured as a list of spaces at once small, confined, nurturing and wild—“the innermost heart of a peach”; a “darkest summer pool”; “the nut in its shell”; “the seed in its pod,” all sites of germination that seem dead but harbor life—the poem progresses to imagine spaces of increasingly unbounded freedom—“with things that are chainless, and tameless, and proud”; “couched with the beast in its torrid lair/ Or drifting on ice with the polar bear”—that seem to imbue the speaker with an almost savage power. This chain of imagery culminates, however, “[w]ith the weaver at work on his quiet loom,” a line that plays on the association of weaving and writing and places this potential power above the bestial natural images that precede. The “weaver” strangely reverses the gender of this traditionally female image, distancing the trope, perhaps, from the fate of Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” who leaves both her room and her weaving to “fall” into another watery death driven by male-directed desire. Conceivably, the “weaver” also evokes and reverses the poor seamstress Mary Furley, whose fate prompted Greenwell’s source. Interestingly, the source in Hood raises the issue of gender for Greenwell’s readers in a way it would not necessarily do for Baudelaire’s readers—since Hood’s text was still very well-known in Britain. With gender thus at the fore, “A Scherzo” delivers some marked reversals. In contrast to Hood’s poem, here all the desire and generative potential explode in its last desperate plea, “Anywhere, anywhere out of this room!” The text gives no man on whom to focus sexual desire, which if acted on might prompt expulsion from the home or room. The desire to leave is powerful enough in itself. The poem’s subtitle (“A Shy Person’s Wishes”) accentuates the social dimension of Victorian British “rooms”—we are to understand that the room to be escaped is not a solitary refuge but a space crowded with unwanted attentions and responsibilities—much like those met with the “strange reluctancy” Greenwell speaks of in her letter. The imagery, however, reinforces the sense of physical constriction—we



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are to understand the “room” as a place of mental as well as social confinement—from which writing provides the potential escape. In addition to reprising and revising the Hood poem’s sentiment, Greenwell’s last line also reproduces Hood’s meter—the dactylic dimeter he somewhat idiosyncratically adopted for such a serious subject, here doubled to tetrameter. This reprise, however, subtly points out that for most of her poem Greenwell’s meter reverses her predecessor: except for this last borrowed explosion of dactyls, the text gallops along in a varied but regular anapestic tetrameter, a kind of burgeoning, building counter to Hood’s creepy nursery rhythm. This galloping rhythm, along with the parallel repetition and the rhyme scheme, propels the poem to this dramatic conclusion; there are no verbs to connect to a subject and thus to drive the text forward. Verbs are either participial, not actively conjugated, or buried midline in relative clauses and, furthermore, seem to deny the speaker any presence at all, but suggest she is only “wishing to be.” In fact, there is no “I,” apparently no speaker—the absent verb has an absent subject. And, just as the poem does not contain its apparent subject, the poem in no way occupies “this room,” words that end but do not close the poem. Other absent spaces form it; their fullness defines the emptiness of the room (but not the poem). In a clear indication that this play with metrical form is highly intentional, Greenwell’s interlinguistic and “interdisciplinary” title names not only a joke in Italian (reinforcing the sense of play if also providing an “out” for the poem’s otherwise apparent anger) but a musical movement in ¾ time—or, poetically speaking, in anapestic tetrameter. Not known as a formalist, Greenwell’s formal, structural, and syntactic experimentation here nonetheless far exceeds anything attempted by Baudelaire in any of his verse poems. Viewed in conjunction with Baudelaire’s appropriation of the line, Greenwell’s poem compellingly evokes the constraints placed on the scene of women’s writing during her lifetime as well as the intensity with which one subject to these constraints might desire, as Christina Rossetti puts it, to “pass from the room.” The different fate of Hood’s line as appropriated and published independently and almost simultaneously by a woman writer in London and a male writer in France eloquently demonstrates the different social and prosodic constraints faced by such writers: Greenwell’s metrical tour-deforce combines a driving galloping rhythm with a range of formal features—substitutions and variants; syntactical upheaval and paratactic structuring—that generate an experiment in verse as unthinkable for Baudelaire as the life of the flâneur would have been for Greenwell.







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PA S S I N G S T R A N G E : C H R I S T I N A R O S S E T T I ’S U N U S U A L D E A D

For all along the valley, down the rocky bed, Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree, The voice of the dead was a living voice to me. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me. —Christina Georgina Rossetti

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begin with my central question: suppose that with Christina Rossetti’s 1862 collection Goblin Market and Other Poems, a transgressive, innovative strain in poetry emerges in England nearly simultaneously with Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal in France and its more recognized poetics of shock. Why did no one notice? Difficult, subversive, self-reflexive, ironic, Rossetti’s poetry throughout this collection is marked by qualities readers readily associate with Baudelaire and the tradition in modern poetry he is understood to have inaugurated. Unlike her French contemporary, Rossetti rarely comments on her poetry, poetic practice, or aims. But supposing she set out to do something innovative and subversive in her poetry— rather than unconsciously stumbling into it, as Victorian readers who recognized her innovations suggested—how would she go about it? Transgression at the hand of a woman writer could not burst onto the scene as “shock.” Women did not “burst” or “shock” if they wished to be received as ladies and wished, as ladies, to be publishable.



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Walter Benjamin famously argues that “Baudelaire placed shock experience at the very center of his art,” and Benjamin’s influential analysis thus places urban “shock experience”—in Baudelaire’s phrase, the “daily shocks and conflicts of civilization”—in the “very center” of modernity.1 “The close connection . . . between the figure of shock and contact with the urban masses” gives rise to the flâneur’s ephemeral encounters and “the sexual shock that suddenly overcomes a lonely man.”2 Rossetti’s collection, on the other hand, has little to do with the “shocks and conflicts” of the urban London in which she lived. As one contemporary remarked, “Christina Rossetti’s mise-en-scène is a place of gardens, orchards . . . it is certainly singular that one who lived out almost the whole of her life in a city so majestic, sober, and inspiriting as London should never bring the consciousness of streets and thoroughfares and populous murmurs into her writings.”3 Instead, reading Rossetti after the “labored and skillful” work of her contemporaries was like “passing from a picture gallery . . . to the real nature out of doors . . . and the pleasant shock of the breeze.”4 The “shock of the breeze” is rhetorically far from the “shock of the new,” although the common term is well worth noting. Social context offers an obvious if only partly satisfactory explanation for this difference in emphasis and imagery: Baudelaire might stroll the most squalid Paris streets at any time of the day or night, while Rossetti could hardly meet a friend for dinner without an escort. A female streetwalker was not a flâneur, but a prostitute.5 A woman might die, however, and raise no eyebrows. Goblin Market and Other Poems, Rossetti’s first major collection—the collection of a woman of thirty—contains poems entitled “After Death,” “Dead before Death,” and “Sweet Death,” as well as the memorable first lines of “An End” (“Love, strong as death, is dead”), “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”), and “At Home” (“When I was dead, my spirit turned”). This brief catalogue by no means exhausts the poems that give a prominent place to death, only those that name it explicitly in the title or first line. Where not rural, then, Rossetti’s settings are cryptically interior, even underground. With regard to the question posed rhetorically in the title poem—“Is it life or is it death?”—Rossetti seems throughout the collection to weigh in heavily in favor of the latter. The topic is nothing unusual for the era whose most celebrated poem was entitled In Memoriam; nonetheless, a growing critical tradition places these poems at the forefront of a reevaluation of Rossetti’s work as “an ironic counter-discourse within Victorian poetry.”6 While Baudelaire’s brutal visions of street life, voyeurism, and sexual predation tensely undercut the formal perfection of his sonnets,



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Rossetti’s “counter-discourse” operates differently. Rosetti, in contrast, tends to make available a reading that will comfort or even flatter the reader, only to undermine such a reading by foregrounding the duplicitous nature of the medium through grammatical sleights of hand, the evocation and misapplication of convention, and what Margaret Reynolds calls a “comprehensive Freudian panoply of dreams, puns, mirrors, dualities.”7 Alison Chapman suggests that “this double within the feminine produces a poetry at once conventional and subversive.”8 In Catherine Maxwell’s formulation, however, this doubleness falls short of transgression: Rossetti “transgresses neither societal or poetic law; she is conservative in that she simply takes advantage of what is possible within it, pushing a position to the limits, making the familiar strange, striking a novel, extraordinary pose.”9 To be sure, such moves have less to do with the shock entailed in bursting through a limit than with sneaking around the limit, with two-facedness, with doubleness as duplicity. Rossetti’s transgressions progress by stealth, by covering their tracks.10 This poetics of stealth or “passing”—a word she uses frequently and often doubly—constitutes a crucial and underrecognized, contemporaneous counterpart to Baudelairean shock. The rhetoric of transgression implies a consideration of limits and norms with the attendant understanding that these norms shape work that transgresses them as well as work that operates within their confines.11 Clearly the social and poetic constraints Rossetti operated within and against were strikingly different from the neoclassical prosodic norms confronting Baudelaire. Rossetti’s “counter-discourse” emerges most distinctly when read in context with Victorian poetics. This emphasis, however, should not be understood to suggest that Rossetti’s resonance and relevance to poetics is circumscribed by its era or nation of origin, but rather that what Mukarˇovský terms “the dynamics of contexture” helps illuminate compositional strategies as well as formal and tropic resonances that otherwise may have fallen from view. Victorian critical convention saw women’s poetry almost exclusively as almost literal self-expression—tears, sighs, or songs that sprung, above all, naturally to the page. As Isobel Armstrong has argued at length, the Victorian era privileged the expressive and emotive in poetry and defined women’s poetry in particular almost exclusively in these terms. Victorian expressive theory sees poetry in terms of “expansion outwards,” “expression,” a “carrying out” of self from enclosure within a barrier. As Armstrong explains, expressive theory takes up the pseudo-Wordsworthian idea of overflow, the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” but elides the aspects of Wordsworthian Romantic



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theory that place equivalent stress on formal and temporal mediation of that feeling.12 Rossetti returns to this stress on “formal and temporal mediation,” if anything, leaving the “powerful feeling”—that which is mediated—behind, an empty signifier, an allegorical tease. Rossetti’s sparse self-commentaries demonstrate “her clear understanding of the separation between the personal and the dramatic and the role of the poet qua poet,” as Catherine Maxwell attests, but also her anxiety about having her “verses regarded as the outpourings of a wounded spirit.”13 Tricia Lootens illustrates how justified Rossetti’s fears were, and how literally this understanding of a natural and expressive poetics could be taken. In review after review, Rossetti’s verse is seen to “gush up out of her heart”; the poetess is evoked “singing sweetly” or “piping” like “a bird on a spray in the sunshine, or the quaint singing with which a child amuses itself.” Metrical and formal innovation, when noted, is understood as “apparently lawless as a bird’s song, yet, like the bird’s song, obeying a law too subtle to be seen.”14 After all, “artfulness” in a woman was considered a serious character flaw. Expressive imagery precludes, however, that any transgression of this particular set of norms be figured as penetration of a bodily or linguistic barrier—penetration was the figurative territory of the expressive mode. In an expressive model, the barrier (social, bodily, or linguistic) prevents expression; the poem makes expression possible through the breaking of the barrier. If in a Baudelairean transgressive poetics, the breakage of the barrier is an end in itself, in an expressive model, this breakage is rather the means to the expressive end. Thus breaking the barrier, the very structure of transgression, is implicated in the very structure of the dominant, normative poetics. If Rossetti’s poetry is a sneak attack on this dominant expressive poetics, a sneaking toward an “artful” woman’s art, this stealthiness is nowhere more unsettling than when the ostensibly speaking lyric voices are dead. Written in the first-person voice of confessional poetry, these texts reveal nothing about the poet as person, relying rather on dead speakers about whom we know only that we (being alive) cannot share their experience. Indeed, Christina Rossetti’s poetics suggest that she concurs with Poe about death’s status as the most poetical topic in the world—although not, perhaps, about why that would be the case.15 In relation to Poe’s infamous comment in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), Elisabeth Bronfen identifies the moment of feminine death as “an aesthetic moment of excess,” as the point “where a text . . . undoes its own premise” and “discloses what it sets out to obscure” (79). This paradigm suggests a rationale behind Rossetti’s sepulchral poetics—but in reverse. Rossetti’s corpses, like the poems



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that form them, give little away, tending rather to obscure what they seem to set out to disclose. This focus also, however, places in sharp relief another convention Rossetti undermines by “embodying”: if in their own verse, women were to put their inner selves on display as subjects, as pure unstructured interiority, in male-authored verse, they were displayed as objects, as pure exteriority, with very little hint of subjectivity at all—in fact, often, dead. Rossetti’s dead thus represent a “double standard”—a double norm that they seem at once to fulfill and undermine. If “transgression is an action that involves the limit,” as Foucault reminds us, Rossetti’s transgressions relate to that limit rather differently: they come about through the limit in the sense of via or by means of.16 The female dead—Rossetti’s means and mode of transgression—are a norm to be transgressed. Given Rossetti’s subject matter, the rhetoric of “haunting” is appropriate, as applied in the field of Victorian studies by Julian Wolfreys: That which haunts . . . is neither absolutely singular nor completely obedient to the laws of the form from which it departs. This is what makes that which haunts so haunting, so uncanny: the apparent familiarity from which there is departure. Haunting and spectral effects are neither simply idiomatic and lawless, and nor do they merely obey the law from which they depart, but operate disruptively from within the most habitual, accustomed structures of identity.17

For women as represented in Victorian culture, one of the most “habitual, accustomed structures of identity” was to be dead.

D Y ING A LL

THE TIME : TR A DITION A ND THE F EM A LE C ORPSE

She was looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful and more ragged than ever; a real artist, a woman without parallel. —Ford Madox Brown (of Elizabeth Siddal, 1854)

The quiet duplicity of Rossetti’s departures from convention is amplified by recalling what traits, by midcentury, would have been conventional among the literary dead. While British women poets made enormous gains in number, recognition, and influence throughout the nineteenth century, almost as remarkable is the proportional gain in prominence enjoyed by the female corpse as poetic and aesthetic subject matter.18 Although it may seem odd that a young female poet




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would choose to inscribe herself in such a tradition, this preference for death on the part of a young “poetess” would not have struck her contemporaries as unusual, given well-established male- and female-authored traditions. In a sense, where a Baudelairean flâneur might pass unnoticed among the Paris crowds, Rossetti’s “cold women” might attain a similar anonymity among the legions of female dead that peopled Victorian arts and letters.19 In painting, Ophelias and Elaines abound, while the pale, stylized faces of Jane Morris and Elizabeth Siddal with their cavernous eyes and blank, indirect stares seem corpse-like even when the subjects are purportedly living.20 Early in the era, Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” (1832; 1842), in which looking at a man dooms a creative woman to abandon her art for the sake of dying beautifully, and Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” (1836; 1842), a dramatic monologue in which the speaker kills his lover in response to her declaration of love for him, set the tone for decades of work in poetry and the visual arts.21 The potentially damaging relationship between female beauty, female death, and aesthetic representation is likewise noted and eerily celebrated: Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” (1842; translated, incidentally, by Baudelaire) features an artist so obsessed with his art that in painting his wife’s portrait he unwittingly transmogrifies her life’s blood into paint; she pales as the portrait progresses—sweetly silent in self-sacrifice for her husband’s art—and dies at the moment of its completion.22 The linkage of aesthetic fulfillment, ideal femininity, and the moment of female death that becomes so dominant by the 1840s did not, of course, begin there. In one influential eighteenth-century precedent, Richardson’s rake Lovelace in Clarissa wants the corpse of his rape victim embalmed to retain it for his personal aesthetic and erotic enjoyment. Yet the nineteenth century’s near obsession with the female corpse as trope may owe more, as some critics have suggested, to the emergence of Shakespeare’s heroines as “central figures in educational schemes aimed at shaping the character of ideal womanhood.”23 This interest in Shakespeare’s heroines as female role models can be traced directly to Romantic critics Coleridge (“Shakespeare’s Charm of constituting female character by absences of female characters”) and De Quincey (Shakespeare is “the absolute creator of female character”).24 Shakespeare is seen to construct female character itself as entity: Shakespearean heroines embody the distilled natural essence of womanhood. That these embodiments also undergo the process of disembodiment—or rather, “disensoulment,” since the body usually remains on stage, displayed to great dramatic effect—does not particularly pose a problem: if the ideal



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woman is characterless, her ideal embodiment is surely a corpse. By midcentury, such ideal women are everywhere represented. Despite stiff competition, however, the paradigmatic female corpse as poetic subject must be the drowned woman in Thomas Hood’s 1844 poem “The Bridge of Sighs.” As Hood’s lovely “unfortunate” plunges to her death under the epigraph from Hamlet, “Drowned, Drowned,” the Shakespearean tradition intertwines with the equally prominent contemporary concern with “fallen women” and what Victorian culture seemed to see as their almost inevitable suicide to produce one of the era’s most broadly influential works of poetry, albeit one now largely forgotten. Poe celebrates the poem in his critical writings, igniting Baudelaire’s enthusiasm, and “The Bridge of Sighs” resurfaces poetically not only in the title (in English in the French original) “Any Where Out of the World” (1867) but—less famously—in Dora Greenwell’s “A Scherzo” of the same year, as well as in countless earlier incarnations in abolitionist editorials, sermons, and novels.25 In his 1874 collection of Hood’s poetry, William Michael Rossetti described him as “the finest English poet between the generation of Shelley and the generation of Tennyson.”26 Some years earlier, Christina connects Hood’s poetry with that of the recently deceased Elizabeth Siddal, whose trials in a cold bath for Millais’ famous drowned Ophelia were often blamed for her failing health and might well have evoked Hood’s female suicide and its Shakespearian epigraph as much as any similarity in the verse.27 While these family connections postdate the composition of Rossetti’s most important death lyrics, they underscore the iconic status of Hood’s poem—a cultural touchstone from the moment of its publication. As such, it forms an illuminating point of contrast for Rossetti’s treatment of female death, and one worth exploring in some detail. Surely no corpse has been so thoroughly ventriloquized, arranged— composed, as the poem puts it—narrated, and read on apparently so little prior acquaintance. In the poem, the very fact of her death by drowning identifies the subject as a fallen woman and, additionally, a suicide. Emblematic of a social concern as well as a growing poetic and aesthetic tradition, Hood’s corpse is “One more unfortunate/ Weary of breath,” and the poem exemplifies a number of Victorian conventions involving women, morality, and death even as it exhibits radical uncertainty about them.28 Through poetry, the corpse is both silenced and ventriloquized, its beauty reveled in and rearranged, “composed,” judged, and read by a male poet and his explicitly male audience. Initial readers doubtless connected the poem with its actual source: the infanticide-attempted suicide of Mary Furley, an impoverished




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seamstress, whose trial and conviction for murder caused a great stir in the London press.29 Hood’s poem, however, effaces the desperate and angry response to penury and workhouse conditions Furley herself described, abandoning sewing, poverty, infanticide, and survival for a young, silent, and beautiful corpse ready to be spoken for. As it appears in this poem, the female corpse emerges as pure poetic material unfettered by any known prior subjectivity, history, or defining relationships: the fact of her death supplies all this and effaces the unsightly journalistic details. Her dead body alone has made her visible and serves as a supremely legible sign around which her life and death can be construed, ordered, displayed, and read by speaker, auditor, and poem. Importantly for Rossetti’s formulation of female death, here it is death that tells the whole story, death that is the ultimately visible, interpretable, and revealing act: it both exposes desire and expunges it. Death renders the corpse both less culpable and more available; the speaker exhorts the audience to “make no deep scrutiny/ Into her mutiny,” but this prohibition does not extend to contemplation of her corpse, as we’re told to “take her up tenderly” and “touch” her. Poeticized death in fact cleanses the woman of the “stain” of desire and subjectivity, producing a more attractive companion and subject for poetry, one that can be arranged at will. Furthermore, if the fact of death has supplied a narrative; the scene of death has supplied an image of such nearly overwhelming erotic liquidity that it threatens the future trajectory of the poem: Over the brink of it, Picture it—think of it, Dissolute man! Lave in it, drink of it, Then, if you can! (75–79)

The speaker, auditor, and poem seem almost in danger of sharing the woman’s watery fate, as the male “dissolute” auditor is invited to get wet in the orgiastic fluidity of the woman’s death, a death that was itself the object and fulfillment of a female desire, the death wish, which allegorically refers back to the liquidity of sexual desire. In Hood’s text, poem and speaker alike are “undone” (in a near-perfect performance of Bronfen’s argument) in excessive enjoyment of the imagined suicide, and the speaker urges the auditor in quite explicit terms to go down on the liquidly erotic female death, in the guise of promoting a moral and sympathetic response. The narrative does not recover, but breaks off



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Ere her limbs frigidly Stiffen too rigidly, Decently,—kindly,— smooth and compose them: And her eyes, close them, Staring so blindly! (84–89)

The imagined moment of death provides the climactic moment of excess Bronfen speaks of, but it is surely this literal “moment of decomposition” that initiates the most nervously self-reflexive moments in the poem. Although we are repeatedly implored to look at the woman and her suicide, we are now asked to join in hiding the evidence of death, to cover the offending stare, to “compose” and beautify—in essence, to replicate the work of the poet on the material of the female corpse. The fear of the woman’s “mutiny” hinted at earlier intensifies, as does the desperation with which he wishes to avoid her “dreadfully staring” gaze. Speaker and auditor/reader collaborate further in the revision of the material at hand. These acts of revision (composing the decomposing) resonate disturbingly with Bronfen’s construction of female suicide as a form of bodily writing, as an autonomous act of female authorship: here any vestige of autonomy is removed.30 Whether Hood inscribed himself consciously or unconsciously into this growing Victorian tradition of female corpse poems, his poem shares with its precursors a tantalizing combination of distaste, relish, and guilt in its treatment of its subject matter.

TURNING

THE T A BLES —D E ATH H AS ITS P RI V ILEGES

In light of this tradition, Christina Rossetti’s own subgenre of dead woman poems calls for a revision of the “aesthetics of renunciation” with which she was long associated. The fate of dead women in the hands of her male precursors and contemporaries suggests that a more literal or even urgent meaning be understood from the line “When I am dead, my dearest,/ Sing no sad songs for me”: as in “really don’t sing”–not a graceful renunciation, but an earnest prohibition. For while Hood and other writers of the “female corpse” tradition may express ambivalence about the violence that the male poetic gaze does



and retreats. The reiterated stock poetic description of female beauty is undercut, however, by the actual state of the corpse—since we must

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its object, or even about whether the female body—divorced from its subjectivity and attractively arranged by the male poet—makes a suitable moral subject for poetry, nevertheless, each poem successfully “kills” its female subject and dwells enthusiastically on the beauty of the corpse. The woman is dead; her male-directed desire, which though desirable in its absence is “staining” in its presence, gratifies male vanity and then produces the death that in turn purifies the woman of its causative stain, rehabilitating her as a suitable object of desire: “pure,” “fair,” blind, and mute. The eyes, whether opened or closed, are arranged by the male speaker, and although they may be of significance, there is no hint that they continue to see. The female role is that of silent matter, available to be articulated and beautified by the man even in the case of the creative and powerful Lady of Shalott and the idiotic Lancelot. A woman—particularly a poet—might well wish to be spared such songs. Yet Rossetti clearly found certain advantages—poetically speaking—in death as she constructed it. It is an unusual version of death. In comparison to the predictably unhearing, blind, and silent dead of the “female corpse” tradition, Rossetti’s dead are a lively bunch. They have consciousness and language: they have the upper hand. Often, unlike the speaker in “Song,” their eyes and ears work very well, and they put them to use spying on men. Then they use language to display their findings. Sometimes they can be seen—as corpses, allowing them access to their mourners’ reactions, as in “After Death”: He leaned above me, thinking that I slept And could not hear him; but I heard him say: “Poor child, poor child:” and as he turned away Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.31 (5–8)

In this poem, the triumph of the female corpse is most thinly veiled (or shrouded)—it is the surviving male who is blinded (unable to see that he is being watched and heard), watery (weeping) and silenced, while the female corpse watches, listens, interprets, and speaks through the poem. Physically, furthermore, the speaker is inviolate: He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold That hid my face, or take my hand in his, Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head: He did not love me living; but once dead He pitied me; and very sweet it is To know he is still warm tho’ I am cold. (9–14)



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He cannot comment on her “lovely face” because it is covered, like her body. The speaker remains untouched, unruffled—and dry. Her vision is clear; she is subject to no illusions predicated on desire; she states flatly that “He did not love me living; but once dead/ He pitied me,” and while that does not sound like triumph, paradoxically, this does: “and very sweet it is/ To know he is still warm tho’ I am cold.” Though cold, she is quite comfortable, privy to privileged information, and possessed of unclouded vision and insight, while he still suffers, weeping, without access to the knowledge and vision that would reveal his true situation. In his tears and lack of insight, the would-be viewer is exposed, blind, and dampened, while the corpse, though hidden, sees all enjoying, as Susan Conley puts it, “the supreme vantage point of death.”32 Catherine Maxwell has read this poem at length as a revision and response to both Tennyson’s “Mariana” and Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover,” finding the poem to construct a “little liminal space . . ., a cryptic reserve and hard-won room of one’s own within the poetic domain,” suggesting that therein “Rossetti’s initial mime of feminine vulnerability subsides to admit a surprisingly hard core.”33 Sneaking up from behind her shroud, the corpse claims a limited (circumscribed not just by shroud and corpse but by the strict sonnet form) but unyielding autonomy utterly denied Browning’s corpse or Tennyson’s “living dead” Mariana. Reminding us that the rhetoric of death also evoked euphemistically “some state dramatically declared to be death-in-life,” Margaret Reynolds hears echoes of “the abjection and self-loathing of the raped and abused Marian” in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh.34 This state and, even more powerfully, the desire for a corpse’s bodily autonomy also recalls Clarissa’s instructions for the dispensation of her body. As Bronfen notes, Richardson’s heroine “states in her will that she desires not to be unnecessarily exposed to the view of anybody, that her dead body should not be touched by members of the other sex,” addressing a final act of imperative writing to Lovelace, a title for his viewing of her corpse: “Gay cruel heart! Behold here the remains of the once ruined, now happy Clarissa Harlowe! See what thou thyself must quickly be; and REPENT!”35 The felicitous transformation of “ruined” to “happy” looks forward to death’s effects on Hood’s drowned woman, although in both Richardson and Rossetti, the dead woman speaks for herself—albeit with a marked difference in style and tone. In contrast to Clarissa’s dire warnings and powerful calls for repentance, Rossetti’s speaker’s cool satisfaction in the contemplation of the living and enjoyment of her newly found detachment find their way into the understated tone and quiet rhythms of the poem,




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emphasizing its departure from the sentimental tradition. In Maxwell’s formulation, “Rossetti’s incorporation of her male predecessors results in a detached and deidealised portrayal of the self. This is a portrayal which is dramatic, but not histrionic, for it invokes melodrama only to diffuse it.” Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs,” Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” and Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” present both the female corpse and the poem as objects of beauty to be viewed—death and poetry offer analogous aesthetic improvements. Rossetti’s “After Death” functions on a similar logic, but quietly constructs a model of poetry that features a beautiful, passive—and female—surface governed by an informing but inaccessible, intellectual but unemotional guiding consciousness for whom it is “very sweet/ To know” while the man watches, emotes, and weeps. The persona, like the tidy sonnet form, is continent. Male readers may look, but cannot get in these inviolate poem-corpses. The dissociative gap that separates calm, perfect form and duplicitous language from what we expect will be a constrained, desiring inner self that creates the impression of a highly ironic consciousness. According to Reynolds, the poem’s title itself already announces “two-sidedness,” and the setting—the “half-drawn” curtains and floor and bed “strewn” with rushes and herbs—creates a world in which “everything is half covered, both revealed and concealed, not light, nor dark, but both at once.”36 Similarly, the thoughtful consciousness, although it seems to tell a hidden truth, reveals little about the “content” of its thought: it seems less concerned that we know what it thinks than that it thinks. Such thoughtfulness is odd in a corpse—and to a similar extent in a female poet, where the presence of a thinking, reflective consciousness might be for many readers (then, of course) the biggest surprise of all. As to what the corpse thinks, we “may guess,” as “Winter: My Secret” taunts, but the poem’s own stake in communicating seems remarkably low. Reechoing throughout the Goblin Market collection, lines such as “I cannot tell you. . . .”37 “I tell you? no. . . .”38 “I will not feel. . . .”39 insistently and repeatedly evacuate the expressive content convention insists must guide a woman’s lyric. Thus emptied, the poetic form on the page remains in a position analogous to—Rossetti’s thematics seem to suggest—a dead body at a wake, at which the viewers are moved to tears while the object of their attention is beyond such fluid expressions. The poetic advantages of the dead are not exhausted, furthermore, by this “corpse poem” genre. In another advantageous mode, the dead relinquish their corpses and pass unseen from rooms that



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When I was dead, my spirit turned To seek the much-frequented house: I passed the door, and saw my friends Feasting beneath the green orange boughs; From hand to hand they pushed the wine, They sucked the pulp of plum and peach; They sang, they jested, and they laughed, For each was loved of each. I listened to their honest chat: Said one: “To-morrow we shall be Plod plod along the featureless sands And coasting miles and miles of sea.” Said one: “Before the turn of tide We will achieve the eyrie-seat.” Said one: “To-morrow shall be like Today, but much more sweet.” “To-morrow,” said they, strong with hope, And dwelt upon the pleasant way: “Tomorrow,” cried they one and all, While no one spoke of yesterday. Their life stood full at blessed noon; I, only I, had passed away: “Tomorrow and today,” they cried; I was of yesterday. I shivered comfortless, but cast No chill across the tablecloth; I all-forgotten shivered, sad To stay and yet to part how loth: I passed from the familiar room, I who from love had passed away, Like the remembrance of a guest That tarrieth but a day.41

As in “After Death,” an ironic consciousness also dominates ghost poems like “At Home,” but the terms that govern this irony are more fluid. The “passing” ghost departs from the static, dry and perfect female corpse to embody an ungendered, androgynous language that allows more freedom of movement, performativity, and sensuality in language. Similarly, the looser eight-line stanza and more flexible rhyme scheme amplify the sense of movement in contrast to the more



continue to enclose the living, as in the darkly humorous “At Home” (1858):40

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strictly patterned sonnet-corpse; the governing logic of the poem’s irony will emerge as temporal, linguistic, and auditory rather than spatial, static, and visual. As in “After Death,” the speaker here is also a listener whose presence is undisclosed to the other (living) speakers. The scene is not a wake, but a garden party, a lively conversation in which the speaker is not an interlocutor, but an eavesdropper. Again the speaker’s death and apparent absence grant her insight and capabilities that evade the living. Those she listens to apparently speak only to each other, but neither the verbs associated with them—“said” or alternately “cried”—nor the content of their utterances offer any evidence they are heard or responded to by the other living speakers. Although they seem to be engaged in reciprocal activity (“each was loved of each”), they remain undifferentiated and nonreactive. They speak in turn and on a common topic, but in a strangely disconnected manner. While the first speaker might seem to be engaging in a little speculation about mortality, the second speaker—if responding at all—seems to interpret the image literally as a proposed walk on the beach, or to offer another image on the basic theme of trust in future achievement. “Tomorrow” comes to function less to name a specific time or even to indicate futurity, and more as a refrain, a unifying chant in another group song. Such speech is strongly associated with the other bodily functions their mouths perform, feasting and sucking, and also with the ritual function of language (“they sang, they jested and they laughed”) that affirms community and reciprocity (“for each was loved by each”). Only the speaker is differentiated, and only she is identified with activities that suggest perception or reception (“I saw,” “I listened”), activities that also suggest the double visual and aural encounter a “reader” might have of a poem. The roles of speakers and listeners are thus doubled in an uneven manner: the speaker is identified as a listener, while the ostensible listeners seem only to speak. The reproduced utterances of the observed parallel the slightly skewed balance of speakers and listeners. The honesty of the “honest chat” is subject to question—or at least to the question “how is it honest?” Each utterance suggests an overt, hopeful meaning and an ironic, undercutting meaning not attended by the listeners—or rather, by the assumed audience of speakers who do not listen. The lines “Tomorrow we shall be/ Plod plod along the featureless sands/ And coasting miles and miles of sea” oddly juxtapose the seeming nonsense repetition, almost baby talk of “we shall be/ Plod plod” with the rhetorical, augmentative repetition of “miles and miles.” The stress on the featurelessness of the sand immediately calls to mind how the “coasting” coastline



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will soon efface the footprints left by their “plod plodding,” how time will erase the living (then dead) from memory just as the dead speaker/ listener sees she has been erased from the consciousness of the living. The undercutting import of the speech is, ironically, temporal, despite the apparently heightened temporal awareness of the speakers. Their faith in the inevitable continuity of temporal progression from present to future distracts them from any insights they might derive from remembering the death of their friend and so blinds them to the very inevitability that infinite time must one day out-progress them in a finite life. Their silence about yesterday, which at first seems an exclusion specifically of the speaker, in turn underscores their lack of integrated temporal awareness. This double meaning reveals the duplicity of their utterances but does not challenge the honesty of the speakers, since they exhibit no awareness of the ironic import of their speech. So, they are also doubly honest: they are honest because they are deluded, but their speech is honest because it exposes the delusion of its speakers. While they cry “tomorrow” five times throughout the poem, they make no move forward. Rather, “their life stood full at blessed noon,” with “stood full” suggesting its more common near homonym “stood still,” the noticeable absence of the anticipated alliterative consonant cluster signaling the substitution, while the near rhyme—ull/—“ill” emphasizes similarity, drawing on an association between plenitude and stasis. Gorging on pulp, wine, and unreflective language has led them to an impasse. The speaker certainly seems to envy “her” old friends their plenitude—often the apparent affect of the speakers in Rossetti’s non-devotional verse. But the speaker has certain advantages, among them clarity of vision, autonomy, temporal understanding, and freedom of movement, all interrelated. With no vista on the past, the living can have no clear idea of the future, whose only true certainty is death, and the raucous speakers remain enclosed in their individual and collective delusions—interacting neither with each other nor with the past. This imbalance is further emphasized in the verbs: the speaker “turned” and “passed” as opposed to the observed speakers who only “dwelt” and “stood.” In this poem it is the living who must remain “At Home,” bound by convention to receive uninvited guests, guests of whom, in this case, they have no knowledge, while the dead speaker, now fully conscious of her mortal status as “guest” among the living, is free to go when she pleases. Here “I, only I, had passed away” literalizes the clichéd euphemism to suggest more actual movement, movement reiterated in the next stanza when, after shivering in indecision, she ultimately elects to “pass from the room.”




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Rossetti’s use of death as textual strategy must also be considered in the context of another distinct body of work—one whose position in the development of a modern poetics is fixed as something to be overcome: women’s sentimental verse.42 In keeping with the gendered poetics of the age, “poetesses” had their own tradition of death poems operating under different rules and assumptions.43 Largely dominated by the Romantic era poets Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon (L.E.L), this tradition enjoyed tremendous commercial success, particularly among the schoolgirls and young women for whom its poems were considered appropriately sentimental and—incredibly— safe, despite the suicide theme that runs throughout their work and, in Landon’s case, tragically into life.44 As Angela Leighton points out, the content, form, and style of such poems were dictated in large part by the popular annuals that published them, which favored a style she characterizes as “the public register of mournful plangency.” In this market-driven poetics, form was always to be secondary—a far, far second—to feeling, which was paramount, as evidenced in the deeply felt and often touching “Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans,” a poem that stumbles into bathos when it most rings with sincerity: They say that thou wert faint and worn With suffering and with care; What music must have filled the soul That had so much to spare!45 (101–105)

Landon and Hemans as middle-class women with dependents and no money were both bound to write in any style that sold, and both were sadly aware of the limitations publishing placed on their poetry. The tradition they formed, however, was a powerful women’s tradition, and one Rossetti, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, saw herself writing from within as well as against. As Leighton demonstrates, when two poems by Rossetti and Landon of ostensibly similar content and identical title are placed in juxtaposition, the difference is stark and appears intentional, even ironic. I reproduce Leighton’s juxtaposition for its illustrative power, citing first Landon and then Rossetti: “Song” FAREWELL!—and never think of me In lighted hall or lady’s bower!



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“Song” When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget.46

In tone the poems could hardly be more different, the formal grace of Rossetti’s quiet understatement immediately distancing itself from Landon’s emphatic anxiety. As often with Rossetti, the gentle lyricism and lilting cadences distract from the near total lack of feeling evinced by the speaker toward her audience: “[i]t will be of no concern to this dead woman whether she is remembered or not.”47 We hear a hint of mild pleasure taken in this very indifference and in the easy alternation between remembrance and forgetting the speaker imagines will go on above her—the twice repeated “thou wilt” not only puns on the apparently inevitable wilting (despite the dew and showers) of the auditor become grass, but contains the aural suggestion of “lilt” and “tilt,” already present as dreamy playful motions in the text. The poem evokes and produces a poetic pleasure of sound and movement freed from the heavy content of remembrance or the emotional cost of forgetting. As the second stanza (not cited by Leighton) makes clear, the speaker looks forward to a strangely negative consciousness, a consciousness that can enjoy its freedom from sensation, the necessity of hearing mournful songs (we may read, like Landon’s), and from any anxieties about remembering the beloved’s failure or success in remembrance, or even the beloved himself: I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain. And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set,



Farewell! and never think of me In spring sunshine or summer hour!— But when you see a lonely grave Just where a broken heart might be With not one mourner by its sod, Then—and then only—THINK OF ME!

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Rossetti frequently employs, as here, negation as a textual strategy for including sensory images and sensual language without having to endorse (or endure) their content. She precludes any sensory impact on the speaker and so distances the words from their meaning, leaving the poem to benefit (ironically) from their impact as sensory word objects, as the sounds and rhythms of “see the shadows” and “feel the rain” soften and balance the thrice reiterated stark reduction of self and sound (“I shall not”) that precede them. It is the form and sound that give the impression of pleasure in melancholy, but this melancholy, like the words associated with sense and sensibility, is hollow, free-floating, disconnected from the speaker from whom expressive logic dictates it should emanate. The sense of the poem might be summarized prosaically by a similarly aged woman of today (Rossetti wrote it at eighteen) as “When I’m dead, do whatever. I won’t notice. I’ll be busy with my own stuff—who knows if I’ll remember you at all—remember, forget, whatever.” Nonetheless, a quietly powerful voice emerges from the layers of this flattened semantic content and the wafting playful tonality of the verse, a voice resolutely autonomous, unsentimental, yet neither bitter nor unkind—a voice in fact expressing no positive identifiable emotional state, seeking no intercourse with the outside world. Death here suggests the possibility of liminal, dreamlike, inner life, but this interiority shows no likelihood of bursting forth onto the page, nor does it seem trapped or in any way excessive. Furthermore, it is strangely unconnected with the voice of the poem—from which it is separated by time (the speaker is not dead yet) and (we assume) a body that can still see and hear. This seeing and hearing body is not, of course, in the poem—its absence coincides with the absent present that the shifting futurity and projected retrospection of the poem otherwise entirely elides. Like the temporal present, the body is relevant to the poem only insofar as its excluded, bracketed existence makes the state the poem looks forward to desirable. In this poem: the present does not exist. The body does not exist. The dead persona of the speaker does not yet exist. The life and presence of the poem is in its form. The auditor who is necessary to that form exists in some sense through the imperative mood, and the “I” exists enough to plan her life in death and slowly effect a simulacrum of this death through the emptying of sense impressions and the unburdening of the remembering process. The genre of the feminine death poem and the tradition of the female corpse lend “Song” the cover story of sentimentality and



Haply I may remember, And haply may forget. (58)

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resignation through which it has been traditionally read. Rossetti’s play with the female corpse may be viewed as a way of deforming an oppressive metaphor, taking it to conclusions its more usual context does not anticipate, reversing the male fantasy of ultimate control and relegating the male viewer/reader/lover to the emotional and textual periphery. Bronfen suggests that later women poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton recuperate “conventional conceptions of feminine death” such that “death emerges as an act of autonomous self fashioning,” and Susan Conley, in citing this passage, offers it as a model by which “many of Rossetti’s death lyrics should be read.”48 Thus “speaking from the liminal space and time of death” becomes “a figure for the woman poet’s disembodied act of creation” and so holds out the promise of escape from the female body that otherwise “ideologically circumscribes her as the muse and matter of art.”49 Viewing Rossettean death as escape from the territory of the body, Conley finds a fundamental tension between this potential freedom and the intractability of the bodily corpse: if Rossetti’s dead speak “from the place of the body—the deathbed or grave,” this place then precludes the possibility of escape seemingly held out. “[T]he cool, self-contained and thus powerful female voice” of Rossetti’s dead woman poems, then, “is kept in close, uncanny proximity to the site that confirms her ideological association with mute, corruptible matter,” the grave.50 Conley’s argument is logical and highly suggestive, but it applies less to Rossetti’s corpses than it might apply to Hood’s or even Browning’s. When Rossetti evokes the physical corpse, as in “After Death,” it is neither mute (if the corpses are silent, they seem so by choice) nor tainted by decay, whether imminent or actual. On one level, this seeming incorruptibility of the corpse simply places Rossetti’s dead in pace with trends prevalent in her age: “the living dead” of the Victorians, as Esther Schor puts it, “and the rotting dead of the skeptical Enlightenment are not the same dead.”51 Yet, elsewhere the corruption of physicality in all its forms is an important theme for Rossetti, particularly in her religious poems. The tension between poetic composition and bodily decomposition is more skewed than Conley’s perfectly logical reading would suggest.52 With Rossetti, it is not the dead who are “rotting,” but the living. Elsewhere in Rossetti’s poetry, physicality is evoked in a positive light only in its absence—or at most, immanence, the most positive form of absence—while its living presence betokens the decay the corpses seem free of. Positive constructions of physicality as graceful form seem relegated to the body of the dead woman as secretly autonomous entity enjoying its shroud’s protection—or, most frequently of all, to the verbal body of the poem. Rossetti thus adapts aspects




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of the male-authored tradition, even adopting the evacuation of subjectivity, but with very different results not only for the dead woman described but for the poem itself, which now, emptied of positive semantic content, gains a new autonomy. For Rossetti, a poem, like a corpse or a ghost, is at once in the world and not—manifest, but subject to different laws. Poetry, that is, offers Rossetti something that life doesn’t—something, in fact, that she doesn’t seem to even want from life. It offers an alternative materiality, an alternative subjectivity, an alternative way of being in the world: in places (like the grave, or elsewhere, like the body of an illegitimate child or “fallen woman”) that she, the polite spinster and very sincerely devout Christian, would not want to be. Rossetti addresses this question directly (for her) in a letter to her brother. In response to Dante Gabriel’s concern that her representation of illegitimacy in “The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children” strays from the limits of appropriate female poetic comportment, Rossetti responds: “. . . whilst it may be truly urged that unless white could be black and Heaven Hell my experience (thank God) precludes me from hers, I yet don’t see why ‘the Poet Mind’ should be less able to construct her from its own inner consciousness than a hundred other unknown quantities.”53 Rossetti does not even speak of her own “poet mind”— the definite article and capitalization both universalize and depersonalize. Itself ungendered, “the Poet Mind” is not subject to the same rules that bind Rossetti, the unmarried woman. “It” is not fettered by her experience. The “Poet Mind”—this “it”—can “construct” a “her”—a “her” like a “quantity,” an “unknown quantity”—by means of “consciousness.” The letter says nothing about the Poet’s Heart, nor about any ability to “express” something that could be “held” by any already extant form. This poetry is not natural but built. Baudelaire speaks of similar poetic freedom: “The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like those roving souls in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes.”54 Baudelaire speaks of “the poet” “entering” another person—a model that maps on well to a familiar association of sexual and literary transgression. The element of transgression as duplicity entailed in masquerading in another’s skin, however, resonates with the Rossettean poetics of stealth, which is recognizable often in Baudelaire as well: after all, in addition to providing shocks, crowds let one pass unnoticed. In this text, however, the “souls,” and “wishes,” of the French poète maudit, oft-acknowledged father of modernism, make him appear as almost tender-hearted, even sentimental—at least, in juxtaposition with the “mind,” “quantities”



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and construction projects of his Victorian “songbird” contemporary. When Patricia Clements traces two generations of modern British poets back to Baudelaire, she begins with Swinburne (Baudelaire’s great champion as well as an effusive admirer of Rossetti) and concludes with T. S. Eliot.55 Both Rossetti’s “Poet Mind” and Baudelaire’s roving soul seem to gesture toward Eliot’s “impersonality doctrine,” but Rossetti’s formulation seems more insistent, if anything, in its “impersonality”—or at least, in her distancing poetry from expressed emotion. Eliot may say that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. It is not the expression of personality, but the escape from personality,” but the task of the poet is still to “express” “significant” emotion—just not his own.56 As I discuss at greater length in chapter 6, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems challenges a great deal of still-received wisdom about how, where, and at whose hand certain qualities particularly associated with “masculinist” modernist poetics—difficulty, impersonality, irony, hermeticism—came to “pass.”







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Meter? Love to. What’s her name? —Anonymous The most skilful artist in verse of the nineteenth century, Christina Rossetti, was very largely a product of metrical exercises. —Ford Madox Ford

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hen Rossetti wrote bouts-rimés, she copied the given rhyme words in a column down the right-hand side of a page and filled in the resulting (often mournful) verse on the left. She noted the time-to-completion at the bottom. Seven minutes, nine minutes: emotional devastation in ten minutes or less, generated in these cases not by a hidden love or secret sorrow, as generations of readers have speculated, but by a list of end-rhymes and the formal requirements of the sonnet. Presented as poetic parlor games such as the young women in Rossetti’s novella Maude play, bouts-rimés seem an unremarkable pastime, but Rossetti carried over these formal impulses and preoccupations into her poetics more seriously—and nowhere more seriously, or more playfully, than in “Goblin Market.” Antony Harrison has argued that this preoccupation with form aligns Rossetti not only with Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting but with “new, avant-garde tendencies arising in Victorian poetry during the second half of the century” that rebel “through revisionist reworkings of particular traditions in the artistic and literary past.”1 “Goblin Market” certainly engages in such a “revisionist reworking” at multiple levels. Reaching back to Skelton but also “down” to popular, even animal forms, the



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goblin chant introduces its aggressive and compelling rhythms and diction—the stuff of street cries, fairy tales, and the London Zoo—to the prosodic and thematic territory of Milton, Shakespeare, Keats, Coleridge, and Tennyson.2 Composed of many prosodic systems interspersed, this collage of structures resolves itself into no single style, system, or story, just as the poem gives the tremendous impression of rhythm and sonority but adheres to no set metrical pattern or rhyme scheme. “Goblin Market’s” violent poetic confrontation plays out over a shifting metrical grid that, like the moral and narrative structures of the poem, suggests the presence of clear patterns only to shift or withhold them. The allegorical narratives tradition supplies—Edenic temptation, redemption through sacrifice—mask the fragmentation and conflict reflected in the arrangement of these narratives in competing voices and rhythms. Through this explicitly violent hybridization, Rossetti calls into question the very poetic and prosodic tradition she also invokes and claims her place in. In an early and now much-heeded call for renewed attention to Rossetti’s work, Jerome McGann remarks that commentary on Rossetti was long characterized by a rhetoric of “purity”—she writes “pure lyrics”; she is a “pure craftsman.”3 It is striking to say the least that a similar rhetoric of purity long characterized Baudelaire’s writings in the critical literature, although clearly to speak of “purity” in the verse of an unmarried woman poet resonates differently than it does in discussing poems by a man who famously died of syphilis. If, however, a Baudelairean “pure poetry” is best typified by perfect sonnets like “La Beauté”—as discussed in chapter 1—moments in Rossetti’s verse seem also to yearn for a kind of pure, disembodied, and above all inviolate poetics, as in the sonnet “After Death” discussed in chapter 4. As I argue throughout the first half of this book, however, those elements in Baudelaire’s verse that invite discussions of pure poetry are systematically violated in the trenches of Spleen de Paris. Similarly, the rhetoric of purity—like the poetic and sexual ideologies it implies—is equally, even singularly, ill-adapted to address the formal and narrative hybridity of Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”: this title poem represents a radical break from the poetics that govern many of the collection’s other texts. I have argued that Baudelaire’s prose poetry may be understood as enacting a “Prose Combat” in which pure verse and journalism (and, alternately, French poetry and English prose, as I argue in chapters 1 and 3) slug it out, and I argue here that Rossetti makes an analogous move with different materials. Rather than turning to journalism or foreign prose texts, “Goblin Market” enlists popular, archaic and often discounted or ridiculed



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prosodic forms to challenge and encroach upon the primacy of a male-dominated, ideologically infused English tradition. Both poets, then, seem to take issue with a prosodic nationalism often projected onto forms such as the iambic pentameter in England or the alexandrine in France. As with Baudelaire’s recourse to prose poetry, however, it is important to recognize that Rossetti’s title poem represents a mode within her poetics that contrasts strongly, sometimes even antithetically, with the more formally continent writings discussed in the preceding chapter. For Rossetti, this mode offers an alternative to the coolness and surface simplicity that characterizes much of her other work. Indeed, the very interpenetration of writer, reader, and written or read that I argue Rossetti’s “dead woman” poems resist becomes her focus in the collection’s title poem. Here, “stealth” gives way—in part—to a poetic mode that has more in common with the Baudelaire of the prose poems: identify the ideals you most love (for Rossetti, based on other poems, we might identify these as poetic autonomy, detachment, and control and indeed, the poems suggest an almost identical set of ideals governing sexuality and gender) and violate them. “Goblin metrics” is a poetics of syllabic and sexual shock, of penetration and interpenetration in which exotic and familiar, high and low, literary and popular, masculine- and feminine-identified traditions, lexicons, and cadences violently collide. All this takes place, however, in and around the familiar cadences of nursery rhymes and street cries and amid a cast of characters drawn from nursery literature—all of which suggest the familiar and the domestic rather than the shocking, whether in terms of form or sexual content, hearkening back to the “stealth” strategies with which I’ve most identified her. Nonetheless, the extent of Rossetti’s metrical and formal experimentation in this poem exceeds any of Baudelaire’s innovations in verse form, although it should again be noted that the difference between French and British prosodic contexts guaranteed Rossetti a broader metrical palette and far greater license—even in her more metrically conservative verse—than her French contemporary could have imagined for himself. Methodologically speaking, this chapter’s emphasis on historical prosody parallels the second chapter’s concern with the nineteenthcentury journalism on which Baudelaire’s prose poetry draws: both projects undertake to render the semantic potential of formal choices more visible, particularly to a contemporary readership trained to see such preoccupations as ahistorical or even antihistorical. The area of focus has been influenced by the poets’ choice of material, of



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course, but also by relative strengths and weaknesses in the scholarly literature. In the case of Baudelaire, the “journalistic” tone of the prose poems has been often commented upon but little studied in its historical context, while for “Goblin Market,” although the poem’s resonance with historical referents like women’s shelters, theological debates, and fruit shortages have been much discussed, the poem to date has benefited from no discussion of the nineteenth-century politics of metrical forms. Indeed, the question of form in Rossetti’s work generally has received far less attention than have similar issues in Baudelaire, a deficit I address more broadly in the next chapter. Thus while recent critics generally acknowledge “Goblin Market’s” formal and linguistic complexity, critical trends that arose in reaction to the New Criticism and its perceived rejection of political and historical analysis have kept the focus elsewhere.4 Harrison’s comments about Rossetti’s “avant-garde” status themselves suggest why readers concerned with historical and political particularity and materiality shy away from discussions of form. Harrison argues that Rossetti’s formalism—and Pre-Raphaelite art in general—is characterized by “timelessness,” that it marked a “withdrawal . . . from the moral, social, political, and ‘modernist’ psychological issues” that concerned the group’s Victorian contemporaries.5 Form—for Harrison here and for many others both “for” and “against”—amounts to withdrawal. Familiar as they may be, however, the terms of this analysis—the formal-social divide— discount a dominant Victorian politics of prosody that reads metrical, rhythmic, and even vocalic identity precisely as manifestations of the “moral, social, and political.” If, as Yopie Prins has advocated, we read Victorian writing in meter in connection with Victorian writing on meter, it becomes clear that Rossetti’s fascination with form need not be understood as withdrawal.6 In fact, period writings on poetics such as those by Edwin Guest (A History of English Rhythms, 1832), Isaac Disraeli (Amenities of Literature, 1842), and James Orchard Halliwell (Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales, 1849) rather demand that we read poetic form as a primary means of engagement with issues not only of morality but of class, gender, and national identity. In this chapter, then, I situate Rossetti’s experimentation in context with Victorian metrical theory, thus restoring the semantic potential metrical choices then entailed. Building on recent criticism that does address formal elements in Rossetti’s work and on a growing interest in historical prosody in the field of Victorian poetry more generally, this chapter also emphasizes the relationship of poetic and social identity that Rossetti herself makes explicit early in Maude.7



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Initially, however, taking a cue from Harrison’s claim about “avant-garde” tendencies, I propose to consider “Goblin Market’s” disjunctive metrics in light of a technique associated not with Victorian experimentalism but with twentieth-century avant-gardes: collage. Again, this foray into twentieth-century debates is germane here in large part because Baudelaire’s impact and effect on French and English prosodic tradition is clear, acknowledged, and wellknown, while Rossetti’s is not any of these things. Before Baudelaire, for example, a few obscure French poets wrote prose poems; after him, French poets wrote prose poems almost without exception. In Rossetti’s case, the terms of influence are less clear and more contestable: often denied when they are palpable (as I argue in chapter 6), acknowledged but forgotten (Swinburne, Hopkins, Ford all explicitly paid homage), or potential but never actual: that is, later writers like Pound and Williams could have looked to Rossetti to find a collage tradition in poetry, but didn’t. This conflicted reception history— the object of more detailed analysis in the subsequent chapter—not just of Rossetti but of Victorian metrical experimentation more generally long allowed critical consensus to define formal experimentation and avant-garde status as male and twentieth-century in a way that excludes a female tradition, implicitly or explicitly. I argue that Rossetti explicitly recognizes this complex relation between gendered traditions and form, and that this awareness leads her to a variety of poetic collage nowhere acknowledged in existing accounts of the technique. “Goblin Market” approaches collage in formal practice and, when read in context with period writings on meter, even effect. The term “collage,” however, evokes a specific lineage in twentiethcentury visual art dated from Picasso’s 1912 Still life with ChairCaning, a moment Christine Poggi defines as “the first work of fine art . . . in which materials appropriated from everyday life . . . intrude on the traditionally privileged domain of painting.”8 In this new art form, heterogeneous everyday materials “retain their former identity within the new pictorial context.” As Marjorie Perloff argues, heterogeneous works of collage poetry such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos were criticized by formalists who, with Yeats, understood form as “full, sphere-like, and single”; collage, rather, favors multiplicity and parataxis and “inevitably undermines the authority of the individual self.” 9 With its paratactic listing, mixed and multiple sourcing, and always multiple protagonists, “Goblin Market” seems to beg a similar discussion. The critical heritage of the term, however, recapitulates the common enough exclusion of women’s work from narratives of high-cultural aesthetic or literary innovation. Most accounts sharply



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Collage was once the simple, pleasant folk art or pastime of cutting and pasting bits of paper. . . . It was no concern of serious artists. . . . It is only with this [twentieth] century and the advent of modern art that this quondam delight of schoolgirl and housewife came to the attention of serious artists grappling with . . . revolutionary ideas.11

The polemical separation of “schoolgirl” and “housewife” from “serious artists” and “revolutionary ideas” encapsulates thinking that explains both why modernism might have rejected Rossetti as an important precedent, and why Rossetti revivalists, on the other hand, might have rejected modernism. Rossetti, however, clearly straddles the fields this passage places in such stark opposition, and makes it clear that she intends to do so.12 Maude’s opening pages explicitly address the project of converting “pastime” to “serious art.” The narrative introduces the eponymous heroine’s writing, furthermore, in its most material manifestation: first as “a chaos of stationery”; then as “scrawled paper”; then taking place in a “writing-book” that was “neither Common-Place Book, Album, Scrap-book, nor Diary” but “a compound of all these.” Maude’s writing draws on a range of feminine forms, each with a particular function: it collects poems, arranges given material, records thoughts, and invites contributions from multiple hands or voices. Such forms and the parlor context that surrounds them impose limits Maude clearly wishes to escape but not repudiate, incorporating them, rather, as material of value. Despite Rossetti’s early representation of a kind of proto-collage poetics associated with common women’s “pastimes,” Perloff is right to derive the collage poetics of modernist writers such as Williams and Pound from the visual arts tradition of Picasso—certainly these writers would not knowingly look to Victorian women’s poetry for inspiration. Perloff also offers a more thoroughly theorized distinction between modernist collage work and some earlier forms of collage-like composition: the arrangement of small articles like postage stamps into portraits or still life relies on the happy surprise of recognition rather than the disorientation effect of modernist work. Modernist collage, she argues, “involves the transfer of materials from one context to another, even as the original context cannot be erased,” thus generating a double reading.13 Rossetti’s poem,



distance modernist collage from earlier domestic “applications” of cut paper such as découpage and scrapbooks.10 Whatever resonance its source materials retain, collage divorces itself entirely from its source practice, as here:

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however, operates in precisely this way, and if we look to metrical rather than narrative or thematic unity as a primary category of poetic coherence, Rossetti’s technique is analogously disruptive. Its emphasis on shifting phonetic, rhythmic, and metrical patterns in fact signals a limitation imposed on poetic collage by an exclusively visual model. Drawing on the visual analogy, conversations around verbal collage focus on visual elements like the word or letter, but if—as poetic theory long asserted—sonic elements such as rhyme, rhythm, and meter are defining constituents of poetry, then these aspects can also be abstracted and transferred while trailing traces of their original contexts. Part of the problem we face today, when reading the double collage-effect of Rossetti’s metrical juxtapositions, lies in the fact that the context of such metrical “material” can be, if not wholly erased, at least largely effaced over time. Because its semantic valances are not subject to systematic codification in dictionaries, meter, though palpable, is more subject even than vocabulary to change, shift, and disappearance as trends in use and metrical theory evolve: hence my recourse to Victorian metrists. Thus recontextualized, the poem’s shifting rhythms, meters, and phonetic patterns recombine to interrogate the material status of poetry, its relationship to the physical— the bodily—and to the social and moral, as well as to the possibilities and costs this materiality may afford.

G O/BL /IN M A /RK /ET Nowhere is Rossetti’s fascination with the coercive, material, and multiple power of poetic language more palpable than in “Goblin Market’s” opening goblin chant. The fruits proffered by (textual) goblins are of necessity tempting words, but while this may seem a truism in a discussion of poetry, the poem accentuates this lexical quality of the temptation and the potential for innovation and verbal anarchy it entails in several specific ways.14 The fruit appear in the form of lists of words that combine the new with the familiar, introducing words unusual in the poetic lexicon—“wombat” and “ratel”—alongside the “bloom-down-cheeked peaches” that draw on stock associations of girls’ cheeks with fruit. The rhyming chant, however, undermines the newness of the words, undercutting any exotic aura of the fruits they signify and emphasizing their function as units of rhythm and sound. The paratactic list undercuts hierarchy, origin, and meaning: its effect is equalizing, mesmerizing, a kind of material betrayal of individual word signification. The material words themselves are “sweet to tongue and sound to eye,” a line which articulates



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the several encounters with poetry—speaking, hearing, viewing—the reader is likely to have and even comments on the interrelatedness of sound and image and their play in poetry. The phrase further emphasizes the sensual pleasure this play produces and, through the multivalent “sound” that appeals ironically to the eye, suggests the sensory and logical confusion that can result. For readers, the list is unrelenting, like the rhythmic, repetitive sales pitch of the merchants who use it: Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpecked cherriesMelons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheeked peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab-apples, dewberries, Pine-apples, blackberries, Apricots, strawberries— [. . .] Pomegranates full and fine, Dates and sharp bullaces, Rare pears and greengages, Damsons and bilberries. (3–24)15

This paratactic form influences other poetic elements as well: the early, very marked proliferation specifically of berry varieties, for example, brings about an equivalent narrowing of sound variety, replicating the poem’s overall tension between repetition and variation, sameness and difference. An analogous pattern emerges on the level of phonetics: as alliterative consonants play off voiced and unvoiced plosive pairings, the replication and reduplication of /p/ and /b/ accentuates their close relation but also draws attention to the very nature of phonetic difference: unvoiced to voiced, silence to sound. This dichotomous pairing also plays out structurally and thematically: the selective silencing of the goblin chant (those who taste the fruit no longer hear the chant) brings about the poem’s violent climax. In an analogous micro-rehearsal of the distributive poetics by which “goblin discourse” infects portions of the poem lexically and rhythmically, the title “goblin market” distributes its vocalic constituents throughout the descriptions of the wares for sale: first



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echoed in “Come buy,” this phonetic material appears in every line of the chant, augmented by labial variants /pl/, /lb/, even liquid variants /br/ and /rb/. Thus the paratextual title—which appears nowhere as a phrase in the body of the poem—distributes its distinctive clusters in abundance throughout. By these relentless and lip-numbing means, the poem presents the aural and oral qualities of poetry as remarkable from the outset and uses these marked qualities to probe the problem of poetic voice, presenting it not as unitary, as the lyric tradition otherwise prominent in the collection might suggest, but as multiple and conflicted. Crucially, however, the poem does not present this question of voice thematically or referentially; rather, it embodies voice physically through a complex collage of phonetic difference that the reader performs but does not “read” referentially in the story. “Voice” is therefore no abstraction or synechdoche here: it is radically literal, physical, and as such, in the moral logic of the poem, the stuff of temptation. The poem reminds us that like fruit to be eaten, voice has to pass through the mouth, the lips, and the teeth. Rossetti, who elsewhere in the Goblin Market collection explores the possibilities of a disembodied poetic voice, here confronts embodiment full-on. What is more, she would have had a critical context for doing so. In his 1838 watershed History of English Meter, Edwin Guest also addresses the question of “poetic voice” in this literal way, locating it firmly in the throat and mouth with a detailed account of the bodily effects of pronunciation. He is particularly eloquent, as a matter of fact, on the effects of goblin constituents /b/, and /g/ (grouped with /d/): In pronouncing b, the lips are closed, and the vibrations are confined to the throat and mouth; in pronouncing d, the tongue is raised to the palate, and the throat and hinder portion of the mouth are the only open cavities; in pronouncing /g/, the tone seems to be modified merely by the hollow of the throat.16

The explicit descriptions of the position of tongue, lips, and mouth grow increasingly suggestive. Guest includes charts that pair “vocal” and what he calls “whisper” letters, while goblin constituents /l/ and /r/ are “trembling letters” because “the peculiarity in the formation of these letters is a certain trembling or vibration of the tongue.” His account of this bodily detail is precise and expansive: In pronouncing /l/ the tongue is raised to the palate, as in forming the letter /d/, but the breath is allowed to escape between it and



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Trembling liquids which cause tongue vibrations, which may be whispered and thus remain distinct from voice, some in-between state of the audible and articulated. Trembling liquids which “escape by the teeth”—The phonetic eroticism of such passages on their own is remarkable. Read in conjunction with the phonetic acrobatics of the goblin chant, however, the erotic force of /r/ and /l/ seem so powerful it seems almost surprising the passage escaped censorship. Where else could a nice girl’s tongue get such a workout? Guest’s evocative material account of the bodily impact of language renders explicit the kinds of effects Rossetti’s text plays on. Throughout the seduction narrative, “goblins” (as phonetic cluster, as linguistic matter) and their refrain permeate their utterance most thoroughly on a level of language distinct from word and grammar, through “unsignifying” particles, or phonemes. By this means, Rossetti explores the power of phonemes themselves to act on the body and thus to accumulate averbal, agrammatic, yet undeniably semantic effects: the goblin chant means that at the sub-lexical level phonemes accumulate and create patterns across syntactic and lexical boundaries. The goblins’ language persuades through sensory assault, not logical rhetoric. Along with rhyme, rhythm, and cadence, these phonetic features distinguish the goblins’ offering as the temptation—and the power—of materiality concentrated in poetic form.

G OBLIN M ETRICS In extending analysis out from the level of the letter of phoneme to a different variety of sound pattern, the very question of the poetic pattern known as meter—that which also occupies Guest in his History—becomes even more open-ended and complex. For despite engaging in marked metrical play, “Goblin Market” could not be said to “have” a meter, itself, at all: no system emerges to dominate and unite the whole. Different rhythmic, vocalic, and metrical tones dominate the initial sections devoted to the goblins (the first chant) and then to the “maids” who hear. No sooner are such poetic identities established, however, than they begin to interpenetrate, and the conflict that arises from the ensuing mixing, interacting, and withdrawing provides a near alternative to narration. These identities are



the side teeth, and thereby causes the loose ends of the tongue to vibrate . . . These tremblings or vibrations of the tongue are quite distinct from the vibrations of the voice, and may be produced during a whisper when the voice is absent.17

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far from pure, however; as with the compounds they go on to form, they themselves are formed of amalgams of prior metrical identities, cobbled or gobbled together into recognizable but always multiply sourced forms. “Goblin metrics,” the most strongly marked metrical identity, itself fuses two potential “alternative” English prosodies— alternative, that is, to the kind of poetic pantheon the period often traced from Chaucer to Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson. Accentual prosody characterizes goblin discourse, a set of rhythms and sonorities that begins as seductive and sensual but reveals itself as increasingly violent, satiric, and infectious. Ironically, perhaps, given its violent and sexual connotations, the most obvious referent for this kind of rhythmic, bodily language is nursery rhyme. While the opening stanza tends strongly toward the dactylic, its strong twobeat structure provides an identifying framework for later, less regular goblin passages. It is well worth noticing that even in this regular portion of the poem, the refrain—structurally geared to establish and maintain a sense of rhythm and regularity—can be scanned multiply (x / | x / ; / x | / x; / / | / /): / x x / x Morning and evening / x x / x x Maids heard the goblins cry: / x x / x / (x) “Come buy our orchard fruits, / (x) / (x) / / Come buy, come buy: / x x / x Apples and quinces, / x x /xx Lemons and oranges, / x x / x Plump unpecked cherries, / x x / x x Melons and raspberries, / x x / x Bloom-down-cheeked peaches, (1–12)

The chant immediately identifies itself with the kind of mercantile street cry it performs, a ubiquitous background noise of London street life, a distinctly oral, nonliterary discourse in which pitch and rhythm



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identified vendor, wares, and locale—and hence a discourse in which formal qualities maintain a distinct and concrete communicative function. The street cry shares this quality with another lowly form, the nursery rhyme, to which it sometimes leads directly—“Hot Cross Buns” and “Buttons A Farthing a Pair” both made the crossover from street to Mother Goose, while “ ‘Oranges and lemons,’ say the bells of St. Clement’s” specifically identifies the buying and selling of fruit both with actual instrumental musicality and street sound. The pulsing dactylic foot—particularly strong in the berry variety passages—also underscores the connection to children’s verse. Often exemplified by the rhyme “Higgledy Piggledy,” the dactyl that dominates the list of goblin wares constitutes a kind of antithesis, in terms of metrical resonance, of the more stately iamb, as Annie Finch has suggested. Period metrical experimentation had led the foot to be employed for more serious aims—as in, for example, Thomas Hood’s popular “Bridge of Sighs” (discussed in chapters 3 and 4), which addressed the topical issue of the “fallen woman” through a fictionalized suicide and thus makes for an intriguing intertext to “Jeannie” and Laura’s suicidal desires. Such experiments aside, however, nursery rhyme would surely be the most prominent association in readers’ minds here, especially given the goblins. A period source on nursery literature, while it does not directly engage with the dactylic form, frames its subject suggestively, directly addressing the profound links the period saw between generic and social identity. James Halliwell’s preface to his 1849 study of nursery rhyme introduces its material with a typical concern for literary morality. Like Rossetti, Halliwell is concerned with the moral effects of poetry—at least, of nursery rhyme—but he argues that ambiguity, even “wildness,” in poetry has a more “elevating effect” than literature that aims specifically at moral edification. Instructors of children, therefore, should not substitute “the present cold, unimaginative—I had almost said, unnatural—prosaic good-boy stories” for “the venerable relics of nursery traditional literature.” He cites Walter Scott, who decries “histories of Jemmy Goodchild” for whom “the moral always consists in good conduct crowned with success” and who further associates these morally didactic tales with the “colder and more elaborate compositions of modern authors,” concluding “our own wild fictions . . . will have more effect in awakening the fancy and elevating the disposition.”18 The “modern” is opposed—by virtue of preaching morality—to “our own wild fictions”—native and untamed. Nursery tales and rhymes, then, are ascribed with edifying effect as the unruly, earthy verse trumps of the overtly moral and “prosaic” “good-boy”



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stories. Such arguments suggest a moral justification for the kinds of sensual, rhythmic forms Rossetti was drawn to and even celebrate the “elevating” quality of such poetic forms over “prosaic” morality. Yet Rossetti’s work in “Goblin Market” comes down on both sides of this dichotomy. While her rhythms evoke nursery rhyme, her employment of these rhythms is certainly “elaborate” and even “modern,” while “cold” easily applies to some of her corpses and even her courtship poems.19 Hence Halliwell’s account of these formal and moral issues may frame but by no means resolve a central poetic conflict. As with Maude’s writing book, Rossetti’s text is not a copy, but a combination of styles, traditions, and the social commentaries they imply. Furthermore, in terms of “Goblin Market,” Rossetti would not have seen herself as the “instructor of children” since she did not consider children as the poem’s primary audience.20 She was not yet writing for children, as she would in her later volumes Sing-Song and Speaking Likenesses, but rather was explicitly introducing nursery imagery and rhythms into a poem for adult readers. To what end? Halliwell’s study provides a kind of precedent for such an adult engagement with the nursery tradition, since his study conceives itself as neither parenting manual nor children’s anthology: although it collects diverse forms of rhyme and tale, its text and ambitions are scholarly. The assertion of these materials’ potentially edifying value only prefaces Halliwell’s analysis of “nursery antiquity”; the first page of the study “proper” presents his argument in terms of a different dichotomy, this one distinctly gendered. Despite writers such as Scott and Grimm, he argues, “who have acknowledged the ethnological and philosophic value of traditional nursery literature,” it is difficult “to induce an opinion that the jingles and simple narratives of a garrulous nurse” can have great influence. Nursery literature’s firmly established gender associations make it difficult, as Halliwell laments, for readers to take the form seriously, even as male scholars have “acknowledged” its “value.” The stakes entailed in this critical question are, in Halliwell’s estimation, high indeed, and reach beyond questions of literary or even moral value: they must be considered because they are “more effectual in proving the affinity of different races . . . than a host of grander and more imposing monuments.” A broadly European tradition, then, emerges, through the examination of popular forms: “the humble chap-book is found to be descended from medieval romance, but also not unfrequently from the more ancient mythology” (1). These common and remote origins explain the many variants of such rhymes in Germany, England, Denmark, and Sweden here presented



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and analyzed, and while Halliwell limits his own comparative work to Northern Europe, he evokes the Italian folk tradition and calls for more extensive and expansive study (1–5). The model of transnationalism does not transcend or transgress national boundaries, but simply predates and seems unencumbered by them. Maude presents a poet who wants neither to break social and literary rules nor to be confined by them, and this work on the nursery rhyme seems to provide alternative models. “Goblin Market” draws on nursery rhyme as the earlier novella draws on discounted feminized forms, recombining their formal and functional elements to expand their limits and draw attention to their material and literary value. Halliwell’s analysis of nursery tradition in terms not only of gender, however, but of transnationalism and morality, also matters for the intellectual and personal resonance of a deeply religious Victorian woman poet of Italian descent. Read in this light, Rossetti’s recombination of nursery forms also taps a pan-European literary tradition as an alternative to the sometimes nationalist-chauvinist world of English language poetics—thus validating and creating a segue to aspects of Rossetti’s literary heritance not included in other Victorian accounts of the English poetic tradition.

THE M ETER K NOW N

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As much as dactyls and goblins suggest nursery origins, what early critics understood as the poem’s dominant prosody draws on a very different literary heritage. A less obvious resonance for readers today, the short, strongly accented two- and three-beat lines that characterize much of the poem scanned for nineteenth-century metrists like George Saintsbury as Skeltonics. Associated with the fifteenth-century poet John Skelton but not, as his Victorian editor Alexander Dyce insists, actually invented by him, the near-forgotten and unappreciated “metre known as Skeltonical” had been subject to shifting critical fortunes among Victorian metrists, emerging as both villain and antihero.21 When we look at “Goblin Market,” it is also the only metrical system that might arguably be said to dominate—or at least, given the multiplicity of voices and rhythms, be said to attain a kind of majority. This choice turns out to be at least as charged as that of the nursery rhyme, if less universally recognizable—period writings on meter reveal surprisingly sharp debates on the moral, national, and prosodic identity and merit of the Skeltonic form. One of its champions, Isaac D’Israeli, describes it at length in his Amenities of Literature: The Skeltonical short verse, contracted into five or six, and even four syllables, is wild and airy. In the quick-returning rhymes, the



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D’Israeli’s enthusiastic account resonates with Halliwell’s estimation of the virtues of nursery literature, and this passage might easily describe Rossetti’s “goblin metrics,” with the “quick-returning rhymes” (the list of berries especially), the “pungency of new words” (foreign fruit and animal names as well as Rossettean coinages like “bloom-down-cheeked”), the emphasis on sound, speed, and the “wildness” Halliwell also associates with the nursery tradition. Energetic physically but also intellectually, flinging “thoughts,” the Skeltonic form here seems to offer much in its favor. But what some saw as a prosodic alternative to Chaucer elsewhere provoked a kind of ireful disdain, making it clear why Rossetti’s apologist Saintsbury would have wished to mitigate the association by specifying her use of the meter as “dedogglerized.” The apparent instability of the meter provokes profound anxiety— almost to the point of a schizophrenia—in the anxious metrical musings of Edwin Guest. While it seems possible that Guest unwittingly sensualizes phonetic difference, his account of meter in general is unmistakably and overtly nationalizing and polemical. On the matter of Skeltonics he pulls no punches, asserting that he has “called these slovenly verses the ‘tumbling’ metre” with good reason. Pitting Skeltonic meter against Chaucer, Guest is at great pains to rescue the latter from association with the “impudent license” of what he seems to see as a competitor. For unlike Skelton, Chaucer’s rhythm approached “the common measure,” the iambic and trochaic meters more suited to serious poetry, and hence set English prosody in the right direction.23 This account of metrical choice is couched in a distinctly nationalist rhetoric: for Guest, the “Englishness” of Skeltonical rhythms is at issue and in question in a way that threatens its poetic and moral value—he characterizes these “licentious” rhythms as strangely foreign (clearly a bad sign). Unfortunately for the consistency of his argument, however, he also understands the same rhythms as “native” (clearly good). He thus claims that the Skeltonic meter’s “short, abrupt, and artificial rhythms of two and three accents . . . though certainly foreign in their origin, were strongly influenced” by “native growth” of Anglo-Saxon “sectional meter” in which “like sounds, recurring at definite intervals, very quickly strike the ear.” In fact, Guest ultimately concedes that the “ ‘short measures’ of Skelton, so popular with the lower classes at the



playfulness of the diction, and the pungency of new words, usually ludicrous, often expressive, and somewhat felicitous, there is a stirring spirit which will be best felt in an audible reading. The velocity of his verse has a carol of its own. The chimes ring in the ear, the thoughts are flung about like coruscations.22

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beginning of the sixteenth century, may perhaps be looked upon as the direct descendants of the Anglo-Saxon rhythms.”24 The anxiety this mixed metrical heritage excites is palpable: despite seeing Skelton and his meter as at once corrupt, low-class, and foreign-influenced, Guest nonetheless identifies him with a key transition between Anglo-Saxon and Renaissance prosodies. A poet of foreign, “Romance” heritage concerned with designing her own metrical transformations in English might find this account of interest. Looking back on Guest’s work, George Saintsbury concludes that his predecessor’s often impressive analysis is blinded by several “obsessions,” one of which is to understand the history of English prosody as a defense of accentual verse against “a succession of alien invasions,” which resulted in “the presence of two hostile elements” in prosody and only “one genuine one,” which must resist at all costs “the rhythm of the foreigner.”25 This account of metrical resistance could almost double as a plot summary of “Goblin Market”—an allegory in which English metrics are figured as maidens either seduced by or fending off invasion by the foreign goblin rhythms. Guest’s actual analysis, however, complicates its narrative of conquest, purity, and resistance by failing to establish a pure heritage or identity for Skelton—either national or metrical. In this way, too, accounts of Skeltonics look forward to goblin metrics.

M ODEST M A IDEN M ETER Viewed against this backdrop of nationally infused rhetoric about meter, it appears that initially, at least, Laura and Lizzie operate with respect to the goblins as analogues of English prosody, beset by potential “invasions” and “the presence of hostile elements,” schooled to resist both “the rhythm of the foreigner,” and the domestic nursery elements also “popular with the lower classes.” Class-based or international undertones, however, are only one aspect of goblin discourse, the most immediate and noticeable effect of which is less allegorical than sensual and rhythmic. The intense physicality of the goblin chant and the raw phonemic and rhythmic embodiment of oral pleasure that inaugurates the poem dissipates with the introduction of the two girls—as does, metrically speaking, the dominant accentualism of the verse. After the strong two-beat driving rhythm of the goblin cry, the poem slows to the more canonical accentual syllabics more often associated with the girls, a change that also marks the shift from the direct discourse of the goblin-barkers’ list to the more distanced, more traditional omniscient narrative voice



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that describes the girls:

x / x / x / x Among the brookside rushes, / x / x / x / Laura bowed her head to hear / x / x / x Lizzie veiled her blushes: (32–35)26

The first line echoes the first line of the poem and replicates its rhythm, but the ensuing lines scan readily into feet. Despite the clearly accentual-syllabic environment, however, neither iamb nor trochee emerges as a clear dominant. The unidentified “maids” of the first strophe, however, here receive names and begin to display other identifying, differentiated features. Each such difference nonetheless seems as quickly effaced or destabilized—is the line iambic or trochaic? There are two girls, two names, two sets of reactions, but which is Lizzie, which is Laura, and how do we keep track? Difference seems at once certain and tenuous. As with the goblin chant, the text here raises vocalic difference to prominence, drawing attention to the signifying weight of sound and letter. In this section, however, the effects are far more modulated, operating within the usual bounds of poetic rhyme and assonance. The play of signifiers is more wordplay than phonetic explosion, and tends to establish binary difference within a paired, similar unit—the girls operating almost like a couplet. The potential pun on “rushes,” for example, signifies Laura’s eagerness as opposed to Lizzie’s “blushing” modesty, and thus hints at the difference between the two girls’ individual relationships to desire and sensual experience, a difference that structures much of the poem. While our introduction to Lizzie and Laura appears to establish a clear difference—we move from “maids” to “Lizzie” and “Laura”—other formal elements produce an equivalent effect in the direction of confusing identity and suggesting undifferentiated unity between the girls, a tension in keeping with a difficulty in maintaining clear differences that resurfaces throughout the poem. As most readers discover, the girls’ alliterative, trochaic names are strikingly similar and difficult to keep straight, and here specifically, the new rhyme pair “rushes/blushes” works on the aural and associative level to envelop the girls in a singular, more muffled tonal environment, with the implied rhyme



/ x x / x Evening by evening

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term “hushes” strengthened by the image of Laura lowering her head to hear. Form signals a sharp difference, however, as the change in meter marks the shift in focus from goblin to girls: the difference between the two tonal and metrical realms is drawn as starkly as the apparent difference in species. After the strong two-beat driving rhythm of the goblin cry, the poem slows here first to three and then to four beats, with an equivalent decline in the strength of accentual stress. This transitional period then ushers in two sets of regular rhymed couplets, one in trochaic trimeter, the other in markedly symmetrical iambic tetrameter: / x / x / x Crouching close together /x / x / x In the cooling weather x / x / x / x / With clasping arms and cautioning lips, x / x / x /x / With tingling cheeks and finger tips. (36–39)

This pairing and modulating is further divided and articulated on the significative and structural levels, in matched sets of symmetrical body parts, matched, internally rhyming modifiers, and perfectly parallel syntax. The meter is hardly regular, although it suggests regularity—its accentual-syllabic variation between trimeter and tetrameter suggests a ballad form or common measure, but it clearly conforms to no such pattern. Since contemporary treatises like Guest’s would have referred would-be scanners to surrounding metrical contexts to determine meter, the metrical identity is necessarily indeterminate in an irregular setting such as this one. Nonetheless, by virtue of the sharp contrast with the accentual “goblin metrics,” the passage clearly suggests a more traditional metrical environment for the girls, albeit one that is delicate and unstable. In comparison, however, and reading through the opposition Guest and others see in the emergence of a distinctive English prosody, if the goblins read as Skelton, the girls read as the analogue of Chaucer, as the tenuous emergence of common measure. The subsequent regular iambic couplet, its tetrameter one foot short of heroic, is typical of a later, statelier English prosodic tradition, but at the heart of this tradition, Rossetti places two virgins whom she in turn describes—also in keeping with poetic tradition—in terms of lips and cheeks. Virginity, divided between trepidation and the beginnings of desire (“tingling,” not burning,



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like the “trembling” consonants of their names), is thus aligned with traditional English poetics along with accentual-syllabic prosody, syntactic symmetry, and modulated rhythm. The goblins’ more accentual verse thus enacts a poetic transgression as much against the moral and literary “high ground” of English poetry as represented by accentual-syllabic prosody as against Laura’s virginal desires. In contrast with the goblin’s strangely diverse, multiple, chaotic voice, then, these “maiden” passages’ strong thematic and lexical pairing and symmetrical couplet form present Lizzie and Laura as a single poetic unit, a unity the poem alternately sunders and reasserts. The first potential breach occurs as soon as this unity can have been established, although it is not initially clear what this difference portends. Laura is the first of the girls to speak, and hence to approach the orality of the goblins. Although her subsequent transgression supplies most of the poem’s narrative tension and would thus seem to mark her apart from Lizzie who resists, Laura’s first words nonetheless caution her sister, which retrospectively will seem a role reversal: / / x x / “Lie close,” Laura said, / x / x /x / Pricking up her golden head: x / x / x /x / “We must not look at goblin men x / x / x / We must not buy their fruits: x / x / x / x / Who knows upon what soil they fed x / x /x / Their hungry thirsty roots?” / / x x / x “Come buy,” call the goblins / x / x / Hobbling down the glen.

(40–47)27

Laura’s speech alternates iambic trimeter and tetrameter—again flirting with the ballad—but its modulated metric regularity already bears traces of goblin influence on the lexical and phonemic levels. The seduction of Laura begins first with her listening, and then with her echoing the linguistic elements she hears; her exhortation includes the goblin words “buy” and “fruit,” names the hunger and thirst this fruit both satisfies and awakens, and furthermore is uttered so



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breathlessly as to banish punctuation (“hungry thirsty roots”) as it projects her own oral desires onto their object. In addition to phonetics, two separated lines also literalize the seductive effect of goblin metrics: Laura’s spondaic command that Lizzie “Lie close” (40) parallels the goblin hawker’s chorus “Come buy,” soon reiterated at 46; in both, direct discourse initiates metrically and syntactically parallel lines, aligning girl with goblin. Although goblin elements enter Laura’s speech first in the form of a prohibition, as a linguistic presence cautioning against a physical one, one of the main functions of goblin discourse is to elide this difference, and thus Laura’s first linguistic taste of goblin fruit seals her fate. In contrast, Lizzie’s cautionary speech avoids any mention of fruit (“You should not peep at goblin men”) and offers no speculation about their wares. Furthermore, she follows through on her prohibition: “Lizzie covered up her eyes/Covered close lest they should look,” the “close” recalling the unified protective pairing of the girls “Crouching close together” as “Covered” recalls the earlier “veiled” and “eyes” of the earlier paired body parts. Lizzie thus seems satisfied on the linguistic level with virginal sisterly solidarity and wishes to close out any visual or aural intrusions that might disrupt its symmetry. Laura, on the other hand, turns quickly from a prohibition to an exhortation to her sister to participate: / x x / x x Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie, / x / x / x / Down the glen tramp little men. / x x /x One hauls a basket, / x x / One bears a plate, / x x / x / One lugs a golden dish x /x x / Of many pounds weight. (54–59)

The rhythms, consonant clusters (/gl/, /pl/ and various individual distributions of these consonants in their voiced and unvoiced manifestations) all powerfully recall goblin discourse, which has further infected Laura’s own speech patterns. The meter here—far now from “common measure”—continues in a nursery pattern that later introduces the goblins’ own physical form.28 In comparison with the more



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traditional, more “evolved” English metrics that has characterized “maiden metrics” so far, Larua’s rhythmic association with the nursery rhyme may indicate not only the infectious effects of goblin discourse but also the sensual yet immature nature of Laura’s interest in and desire for the language she hears. Lizzie’s response, on the other hand, prefaces regular couplets with repeated negation, and entails no goblin sonority or interest: “Their offers should not charm us,/Their evil gifts would harm us” (65–66), upon which she firmly closes the crucial orifices through which language can enter consciousness and runs away, absenting her eyes, fingers, and ears from the scene. With Lizzie’s absence, lingering Laura’s attention turns to the goblins themselves, and readers get a first glimpse of their own physical forms as well: / x x / x One had a cat’s face, / x x / One whisked a tail, / x x x / x One tramped at a rat’s pace, / x x x / One crawled like a snail, / x x /x / x / x /x One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry, / x x /x / x /x / x One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry. (71–76)29

Like their fruits but even more obviously, the goblins represent a melange of the foreign and domestic—and like their fruit, their description mixes the poetically unfamiliar “ratel” and “wombat” with the domestic “rat” and “snail” and the cozy nursery rhetoric of “furry”/ hurry skurry.” The return to conventional meter and the traditional nature of the images and lexicon that form the next short strophe—entirely devoted to Laura—thus appears in sharp contrast to goblin discourse: / x / x / x / Laura stretched her gleaming neck / x / x / x / Like a rush-imbedded swan, / x /x / x / Like a lily from the beck,



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/ x / x / x / Like a moonlit poplar branch,

/ x / x / x / When its last restraint is gone.

In contrast to nonnative words that keep the company of “low” children’s language like “hurry-skurry,” the lexicon of words and images here is recognizably English and as traditionally “poetic” as its dominant figure of speech. A chain of similes likens virginal Laura to a (white) swan, a (white) lily, a “moonlit poplar branch” (strongly recalling Romantic imagery) and a ship—the last less typical, but predictably female, and hardly exotic. The regular, rising rhythm also conforms to what period metrists felt was a more naturally English rhythm. Throughout this traditionally resonant passage that narrates Laura’s doomed resistance, however, she herself remains silent—she is narrated but not participatory. Meanwhile, the goblins chant their “shrill repeated cry” and “troop” up the hill until they reach her: Leering at each other, Brother with queer brother; Signaling each other Brother with sly brother. (93–97)

Remarkably, given the intensely oral nature of their hawker’s cry, the goblins communicate among each other with silent, nonverbal sign systems, apparently reserving spoken language for its enticing, “market” role—their only speech is the reprise of their chant (“Come buy, come buy”). As Laura makes no response (she “stared but did not stir/Longed but had no money”), the goblins address her more directly, in terms that continue the strong association between physical taste, language, rhythm, and seduction: x / |x /| x / |x / The whisk-tailed merchant bade her taste x / |x / | x /x In tones as smooth as honey, x / x / The cat-faced purr’d, x / x x(/) x / The rat-paced spoke a word



/ x /x / x / Like a vessel at the launch

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x / x x x / x x x x / Of welcome, and the snail-paced even was heard;

x x x /x x(/)x x x /x Cried “Pretty Goblin” still for “Pretty Polly”;—(107–113)

“Pretty Goblin” marks the entrance of the threatening in the guise of familiar nonsense, effected through exchange of elements—a “compound.” The verse itself references the mixing of street and animal rhythms and, with its concern with “pacing,” even meters. The meter, however, lacks the mesmerizing regularity of the initial goblin chant, shifting from the accentual-syllabic tetrameter-trimeter alternation typical of the girls to a chant at 109–110, which may continue irregularly (and accentually) to complete with “tumbling” Skeltonical rhymes on “purr’d/word/heard.” The rhythm noticeably slows with the “snail-pace” voice, the line lengths extend and could also approximate awkward feet, although an accentual reading remains more convincing. What is occurring at a variety of levels—“Goblin” for “Polly”; accentual for accentual-syllabic, as the line that contains the polly/goblin lexical substitution also scans into iambs—is exchange, a hybridization of different non-denotative linguistic modes, a mixing and layering of metrical effects: a formal prelude to the upcoming symbolic exchange of hair for fruit. Thematically, this exchange completes Laura’s corruption (136), but significantly, Laura’s “fall” gets narrated in iambs: “She clipped a precious golden lock,/she dropped a tear more rare than pearl,/ Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red:” (126–128). After the colon, three successive trochaic substitutions describe the fruit and its effects as they might occupy her mouth—“Sweeter than honey from the rock,/Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,/ Clearer than water flowed that juice;” (129–130)—but the narration of her fall quickly returns to iambs, starkly and powerfully stressed: “She sucked and sucked and sucked the more” (134). Once sated, Laura takes a kernel stone and leaves, temporally and visually confused. Confusion—the hybridized goblin influence—is what Lizzie fears for her sister: Lizzie greets Laura on her return from her illicit feast with the warning “Twilight is not good for maidens” (144); twilight, as the indeterminate state between dark and light, day and night, threatens a confusion of categories and of the clear distinction on which virginity, an emblematic either/or state, relies. The first mention of Jeannie stresses that she ate twilit fruit but pined in “noonlight,” a typically



x /x x(/) x / x One parrot-voiced and jolly

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I’ll bring you plums tomorrow Fresh on their mother twigs, Cherries worth getting; You cannot think what figs My teeth have met in, What melons icy-cold Piled on a dish of gold Too huge for me to hold. (170–178)

Lexically, phonemically, and rhythmically, Laura’s speech now fully embodies “goblin discourse” and tags, with the reference to “teeth,” the bodily oral location of this encounter. Larua’s bodily corruption is complete. The intervening section retracts this rhythm, however, returning the girls to symmetrically enfolding language that recalls the unity of their introductory strophe and comparative regularity, and also traditional similes from Laura’s doomed resistance likening femininity to birds and flowers: they lie “Golden head by golden head,/ Like two pigeons in one nest” (185) and “Like two blossoms in one stem,/ Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow” (188–189). Once again, they are configured in symmetrical pairs of paired body parts “Cheek to cheek and breast to breast/ Locked together in one nest” (197–198). The cadences are rhythmical, but gently lilting and melodious; the harmony of the sisters in bed neither invigorates nor destroys poetry. Domesticity, however, does the latter, and in the next section, the linguistic and poetic breach introduced between the girls by the goblin “fruit” widens. Rossetti is not kind to domesticity in her poems, associating it with a routinization and repletion that opposes the stark poetics of absence or desire. While repletion receives a more complex treatment in “Goblin Market” than elsewhere, this passage is no exception to the anti-domesticity rule, despite (or perhaps because of) its cheerful tone:30 / x / x / x /x Neat like bees, as sweet and busy, / x / x / x Laura rose with Lizzie: / x /x / x / Fetched in honey, milked the cows,



Rossettean allegory of satiety that leads to starvation. Lizzie’s cautions come too late, however; Laura’s reply is replete with goblin resonance, although it does not wholly reproduce the driving two-beat rhythm of their cry:

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/ x /x / x / Aired and set to rights the house,

/ x /x / x / Cakes for dainty mouths to eat, (201–206)

The verse describing Laura and Lizzie’s housekeeping is cloyingly sweet and markedly free of goblin rhythms or vocalic echoes, its vowels consist of predominantly bright long /e/s and /i/s and only the occasional softened back vowel. The rhythms, syntax, and easy couplet rhyme render this passage far more regular and readily anticipated “maiden meter” than the prosody that characterized the girls’ interactions outside the home. While they talk “as modest maidens should” (209), this no longer suffices for Laura. Lizzie’s talking “with an open heart” (210) so closely following the comment on “modest maiden” discourse may suggest a jab at the feminine expressive tradition, while “Laura in an absent dream” sounds closer to the Rossettean poetics of absence that appears elsewhere in the collection. The close of the passage makes clear on the formal level which poetics is the stronger: we have “One warbling for the mere bright day’s delight,/ One longing for the night,” and the strength of the blunt metrical and thematic shift to “longing” from “warbling” completes the commentary on one strain of “feminine” poetics, “warbling” being a common critical cliché in period reviews of women’s poetry.31 The following stanza, however, abandons the poetics of domesticity and returns the girls to a specific male-authored tradition. By the goblin brook, Lizzie’s speech abandons the cloying rhythms of domestic life—for Tennysonian diction: At length slow evening came: They went with pitchers to the reedy brook; Lizzie most placid in her look, Laura most like a leaping flame. They drew the gurgling water from its deep; Lizzie plucked purple and rich golden flags, Then turning homewards said: “The sunset flushes Those furthest loftiest crags”; (215–222)

In a line marked off by quotation, Lizzie’s direct discourse reprises “The Lotos Eaters”: “far off, three mountain tops,/ Three silent pinnacles of agèd snow,/ Stood sunset flushed” (15–17); Rossetti’s “slow evening” comes “at length” while Tennyson’s “charmèd sunset



/ x / x /x / Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,

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lingered low adown” (19), and other thematic, lexical, and phonemic echoes abound.32 Unlike Tennyson’s sailors, however, Lizzie regards this scene while “turning homewards,” and the diction and frame of reference then shifts within the quotation. Lizzie urges Laura to return also in language that retreats to the more maidenly (“ ‘not another maiden lags,/ No wilful squirrel wags,/ The beasts and birds are fast asleep’ ”) (223–225). Again, the grand heritage of English prosody is strongly associated with the virginal and maidenly. Just as Lizzie turns from the Tennysonian landscape and eschews luxuriant surfeit, Laura longs for but can no longer hear the goblin’s cry “With its iterated jingle/Of sugar baited words” (223–224). The Tennysonian echo evokes luxury, but Lizzie rejects it, while for Laura, its promise is withdrawn. This distinction marks a clear difference between the related texts: Tennyson’s poem, for all its ambivalence toward the scene it portrays, revels linguistically in satiety, and the surfeit it depicts fills and constitutes the poem. In Rossetti’s poem, desire fulfilled produces only more desire fed by absence, not fullness and presence, and throughout the rest of the poem, fruit is present only to the undesiring Lizzie. It is a poetry of sensation, but not of plenitude and fulfillment. This sensual poetics of absence—yet another “compound” the poem achieves—develops further in the metrically complex section in which Laura confronts the impossibility of material fulfillment. What follows continues this intricate layering of metrical and rhythmic effects: / x / / x / Laura turned cold as stone x /| x /| x / | x /| x / To find her sister heard that cry alone, x /| x / That goblin cry, / x x / / (x) / “come buy our fruits, come buy.” / x x /x / / x / ( x / x / x x / x /) Must she then buy no more dainty fruit? / x x / x / x / x / ( x / x / x / x / x /) Must she no more such succous pasture find, (/ / x /) x / x / Gone deaf and blind? (253–259)



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This passage juxtaposes the echo of rhythmic, seductive goblin cry with lines in more stately yet also more awkward iambic pentameter. The quoted cry at 256 stands for what Laura now realizes she cannot hear: the re-“iterated jingle” present textually stands explicitly for its own absence, a facet of language Rossetti often explores. Yet here the language does not merely stand for the absence of what it signifies (as “plum” cannot coincide with the presence of the round juicy thing)— the written signs stand for the absence of aural signs, a significant development within the poem. Aurally rich goblin discourse abandons Laura to rather flat and only weakly iambic verse (the lines scan severally but in all cases less than convincingly), rhythms that seem at odds both with her desire (254; 257–258) and with the rhythmically blunt poetic power of absence: “Gone deaf and blind” (a line that also allows for various accentual variants, but all of them strong and convincing). Her rhythmically anomalous query (“Must she . . . ”), which forms a contrast to the driving “iterated jingle” she no longer can hear, further augments the force of Laura’s now mature longing as opposed to the nursery- or barker-rhythms of either the goblin cry or Lizzie’s maidenly poetics. This mature yet frustrated female desire—born of knowledge and material exposure, emphatically not of innocence—makes inroads into the poetic tradition of the “maidenly” canon (the tradition signaled by the return of pentameter, which nonetheless seems at 258–259 inadequate) but does not remain constrained by it, and so produces some of the most affecting poetry of the poem: x /|x /| / x |x / Her tree of life drooped from the root: x x / / / x x / / / She said not one word in her heart’s sore ache x /| x / | x /| x /| x / x But peering thro’ the dimness, naught discerning, / / | x /| x / | x /| x / Trudged home, her pitcher dripping all the way; x / x / x / So crept to bed, and lay /x x / x / Silent till Lizzie slept; x x /| xx / |x x / | x Then sat up in a passionate yearning, x / | x /| x / | x /| x / And gnashed her teeth for baulked desire, and wept



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At this important formal crux, Rossetti’s complex layering of meter continues to foreground the signifying potential of rhythmic shifts, but this signification is more nuanced than the driving sensual presence that characterizes the goblin song. Like the traditional “tree of life” image, iambic tetrameter (260) evokes canonical English prosody but also echoes the vocalics associated with the “fruit” withheld (“drooped”; “root”). The powerful silence of Laura’s longing interrupts this traditional meter, and the back vowels of the absent language of desire (“not one word”) emphasize the triple beat and seem again to extend—to “long” into the longer vowels of the non-uttering “heart’s sore ache”—suggesting play with quantitative prosodic models as well. In a similar vein, another return to iambic pentameter (262) describing Laura’s blindness breaks off by the intrusion of “feet” as they spondaically “Trudged home,” which gives way again to iambs describing the “dripping pitcher,” another clear indication of her sexual arousal, carnal experience, and resulting “drooping root.” Metrical, vocalic, and stylistic hybridity and diversity mark this passage as a “compound” in the Maude-ean sense, but Laura herself is not a participant in this exchange. While the excitement of language now surrounds and constitutes Laura in the poem, she herself gives voice to none of it; her expression is represented as oral and liquid, but not verbal. Female expression (tears and dripping), then, is distinct from poetry, which explicitly does not “express”—a task left to the weeping, gnashing body. This body and its senses once awakened fail Laura and cut her off from the visual, aural, and oral experiences that constitute the object of her desire—the very senses that also provide the experience of poetry. But here the desired poetry is inaccessible to the body. The poem seems both to draw a distinction and insist upon a relationship between prosodic and bodily materiality. Laura looks and listens, but sees and hears no goblins, fruit, or song. Similarly, her own language, earlier infected by goblin rhythms and sonorities, has dried up; she watches “in sullen silence of exceeding pain” (271). The poetry that accrues around her silence and her inability to hear generates two lines in pentameter, and, interrupted by the reiteration of the now unheard goblin cry, her “decline” (a daytime phenomenon) is narrated in pairs of iambic lines of declining length from pentameter, tetrameter, to trimeter. The line that pairs her “dwindling” with the



x /|x /| x / As if her heart would break. (260–268)

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Laura kept watch in vain In sullen silence of exceeding pain. She never caught again the goblin cry: “Come buy, come buy;”— She never spied the goblin men Hawking their fruits along the glen: But when the noon waxed bright Her hair grew thin and gray; She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn To swift decay and burn Her fire away. (276–280)

At the level of the letter, the tiny but all-important difference between “noon” and “moon” seems destabilizing, as “noon” waxes and the “moon” burns. In the next strophe, meter and rhyme similarly signify: the false hope engendered by the “kernel stone” she retained from the goblins initiates a return of goblin rhythms and sonorities. Although, again, here “goblin metrics” stand in for their own physical absence to the expectant Laura, they are audible and sensible to the reader of the text. Dewed it with tears, hoped for a root, Watched for a waxing shoot, But there came none It never saw the sun It never felt the trickling moisture run.

(283–287)

Signs of fruition and fertility—“sun”; “moisture”—indicate absence and failure only: the only moisture actually “present” in the represented scene—tears, the female “expressions” of desire and longing—bears no fruit. Poetry again accrues around this failure of expression but is not constituted by it; it finds its occasion, rather, again in absence, silence, and depravation: “While with sunk eyes and faded mouth/She dreamed of melons, as a traveler sees/False waves in desert drouth” (288–290). Domesticity, it is crucial to note, also fails her; her condition of “baulked desire” ruins her for housework and, ultimately, for any food but goblin fruit. Poetry has been nourished by her ruin, but she only starves: an unfortunate economy, it might seem, for a woman poet to contemplate.



“fair full moon” expands back to five beats, accentuating the rapid contraction of “swift decay” and extinction:

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This analysis of prosodic difference and prosodic encounter establishes some surprising patterns in the construction of prosodic identity in the poem. While most readers understandably associate the girls with a female tradition in poetry, their prosodic environment features far more of traditional, male-dominated English metrics and imagery than any poetry associated with the goblins. An accepted lineage of English prosody typically discussed in terms of national identity and conquest is here—initially at least—associated with blushing virginity, while a female tradition—nursery rhyme—bears a large influence on the invasive and threatening “goblin metrics.” The potential freedom unleashed by the possibility of a female poetics of bodily surfaces rather than expression and ingestion comes to the fore in Lizzie’s experience. In a sense, virginal Lizzie becomes a hermetic text. Undesiring Lizzie, still able to hear the goblin’s cry, out of concern for her sister arms herself with “a silver penny in her purse . . . And for the first time in her life/Began to listen and look” (234–328). Goblin language only intensifies in response—they are “flying” (232), “[c]huckling, clapping, crowing/Clucking and gobbling,” literally performing themselves linguistically, physically hugging, kissing, caressing Lizzie, and encouraging her to “look,” “bob at,” and “bite” their “citrons,” “grapes,” “pears,” and “plums,” and finally to “Pluck them and suck them” (352–362). As Lizzie refuses to eat with them, the tonality and tenor of the goblin speech and action changes: they are now “Grunting and snarling” (393) and “cross-grained, uncivil.” Their language, all the while retaining their signature rhythms, turns from seduction to rape: Their tones waxed loud, Their looks were evil Lashing their tails They trod and hustled her. Elbowed and jostled her Clawed with their nails Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking, Tore her gown and soiled her stocking, Twitched her hair out by the roots, Stamped on her tender feet, Held her hands and squeezed their fruits Against her mouth to make her eat. (396–408)

Somewhat ironically, Lizzie is rescued from this fate by another chain of stock epic similes for virginity and femininity from the traditional poetic lexicon: she is “White and golden,” “Like a lily,” “Like



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a beacon left alone” “like a fruit-crowned orange-tree/White with blossoms honey sweet” (the costume worn by virgin—hence still marriageable—brides) that though “Sore beset by wasp and bee” remains unfertilized, “Like a royal virgin town.” Unlike her sister, Lizzie doesn’t swallow. Lizzie’s experience among the goblins presents an alternative relationship to the physically coercive power of language. Lizzie goes to the goblins and grapples with their fruit, but she does not internalize, does not herself ingest or desire. Her motivating desire—to bring back goblin fruit—is not her own but a representation of another’s desire. In a radical, painful, and profoundly physical way, Lizzie embodies the goblin fruit: she gives form to male expression. It takes her form “lodged in dimples of her chin” (435). Lizzie embodies and makes available expressed, and hence formless, male bodily “juice” but does not herself partake. Had we any doubt that Lizzie’s might be an allegory of poetic experience, we learn she is “pinched black as ink”—a profoundly bodily textuality, but a textuality nonetheless. In the meantime, however, she “would not open lip from lip” (431) and “uttered not a word” (430). The role reversal between female orality and expression and masculine “form giving” is markedly ironic—how incontinent those goblins are, and how moist. Lizzie, on the other hand, “laughs at heart” as she feels them drip. This alternative to orality suggests a role for written poetry—a textual body may mediate between desire and moral compromise. With Lizzie’s encounter, goblin fruit has become an external affair, physical but non-penetrating and hence, ultimately, salutary. What had been a consuming language is now a surface affair—more analogous to writing, a play of pen on paper, than to the aggressive oral transmission of goblin fruit and word. Both “Goblin Market” and the earlier Maude explicitly present poetic identity as gendered, but the later poem fails to align prosodic identity with the sexual division of male goblin from female maiden that structures the poem in other ways. This identity shift is no simple reversal, as the interpenetration of verses, traditions, genders (and fruit) threatens or promises a dizzying confusion. Through metrical and vocalic interpenetration, the poem “tells,” without telling, a tale of bodily and spiritual permeability, of identities forged through difference rather than stability, apparent unities cobbled together from preexisting forms that as easily disintegrate into difference. Maude’s “writing-book” that constructs itself specifically from forms that are themselves compounds and collages serves as an early reminder that in literary collage the sources are always themselves multiple. Poetic



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identity emerges as unstable and liable to material transformation as the result of contact and exchange. Since metrical theory of the day strongly connected prosodic and other forms of social identity, it is tempting to see a claim about personal and social identity emerge from the recombinatory exuberance of the poem. The apparent retreat from hybridity that marks the closing of the poem, however, troubles such a reading. Indeed, I want to suggest that the poem privileges, specifically, the written poetic text as a place of exchange, freedom, and dissimulation, but one which gains this freedom specifically by not being bound by the same rules of behavior that govern its writers. I return, in closing, to Antony Harrison’s claim about Rossetti’s withdrawal into form to suggest that while form here is no withdrawal, neither is it a bodily engagement exactly like Rossetti’s spiritual work at, say, Highgate Penitentiary. Rossetti’s own writings are concerned with the mechanisms and costs of the material engagement poetry entailed: her clear ambivalence about the very materiality Harrison rightly emphasizes in her work derives precisely from her fear of its worldliness. This fear feeds the religious and poetic crisis at the heart of Maude, when a deeply felt conflict between the heroine’s poetic ambitions and religious convictions leads her to reject Holy Communion.33 By this early fictional account, the stakes of writing poetry are high indeed, and death must intervene to solve the crisis with its unambiguous withdrawal from both poetry and the rest of the world. Ford Madox Ford—her nephew by marriage—knew her at the close of her life, and writes movingly of this struggle with materiality, sensuality, longing, and a ferocity that seems at home in “Goblin Market”: . . . this tranquil Religious was undergoing in herself always a fierce struggle between the pagan desire for life, the light of the sun and love, and an asceticism that, in its almost more than Calvinistic restraint, reached also to a point of frenzy. She put love from her with both hands and yearned for it unceasingly; she let life pass by and wrote of glowing tapestries, of wine and pomegranates; she was thinking always of heaths, the wide sands of the seashore, of south walls on which the apricots glow, and she lived always of her own free will in the gloom of a London square. So that if Christianity have its saints and martyrs, I am not certain that she was not one of the most distinguished of them. For there have been ascetics, but there can have been few who could have better enjoyed a higher life of the senses. (67)

Ford speaks of resignation—and frenzy. “Goblin Market” focuses long on the latter before seeming to resign itself at the end. Overall,



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the text’s poetic logic renders longing and absence, desire awakened and thwarted less as occasions for repentance and spiritual salvation than as nourishment for powerful poetry. If we take Maude as an indication of its author’s position, Rossetti seems to fear poetry less as a withdrawal from this world than from the next—precisely by engaging her too directly and materially in this one. The later “Goblin Market,” however, imagines a more nuanced role for poetic materiality: here the poetic text is an alternative means of engagement, an alternative or proxy way of being bodily in more multiple, varied, sensual, and even violent ways. In other words, just as meter is both material and nonmaterial, palpable and yet ineffable, the bodily language of poetry and its place in the material world represents, for Rossetti, the possibility of having it both—or more—ways.



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“ W H E N I A M D E A D , M Y D E A R E S T . . .”: MODE R N ISM R E M E M BE R S A N D FORGET S ROSSET T I

“I am Christina Rossetti” —Virginia Woolf Christina . . . sets my teeth on edge —Ezra Pound

S

andra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have famously argued that modernism—in particular, formalist and language-centered, experimental literary modernism—was “constructed not just against the grain of Victorian male precursors” but as part of “a complex response to female precursors and contemporaries” and that the reaction “against the rise of literary women became not just a theme . . . but a motive for modernism.” Gilbert and Gubar implicate Pound and Eliot’s “twin strategies of excavation and innovation” and “the linguistic innovation associated with the avant-garde”—they specify puns, allusions, and “arcane and fractured forms”—in a project of cultural elitism that excludes women. Despite the “intermittent” participation of “a Gertrude Stein and a Djuna Barnes,” they contend, formal innovation of this kind is “a men’s club.”1 Like most pioneering, first-generation feminist criticism, No Man’s Land has received its share of sharp critique, some of it justified. It is, for instance, hard to understand Gertrude Stein’s participation in poetic modernism as “intermittent.” In the wake of this study, furthermore, modernist



C

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studies as a field of inquiry has multiplied and expanded; the critical discourse has chronicled and reflected the emergence of “modernisms” both as phenomena and term, while critiques across the ideological and methodological spectrum reflect a greater understanding of gender, racial, and poetic heterogeneity in a period long misunderstood as monolithic.2 Although clearly my own comparatist project embraces this new multiplicity, I feel that the deposed monolith— that is, the highly influential if largely mythic “high modernism” as it was understood before the explosion of difference on the critical scene—wielded such far-reaching pedagogical and critical influence that it still bears consideration. The “thrust” of my argument, as the masculinist tradition in criticism I’m referencing might put it, is as follows: modernism should have liked Rossetti, and modernism knew it should have liked Rossetti. Modernists, however, had a vested interest in not being Victorian, and thus would not like to locate the characteristics they understood as modern in the previous century’s maiden aunt—with the exception, ironically, of the critic whose maiden aunt she actually was. In this chapter, I employ a sense of “modern” poetry and poetics that differs from the understanding I have relied on thus far. Until now, I’ve been reconsidering the Baudelairean/Benjaminian modern—the most recognized, influential articulation of the nineteenth-century modern—and proposing Rossettean stealth as an under-recognized contemporary counterpart. This counterpart not only includes the experience and poetics of an important female poet but also reflects back on the Baudelairean model, placing both “stealthy” and “Victorian” aspects of his poetics in sharper relief. The current chapter, by contrast, looks back at Rossetti from the perspective of twentieth-century modernism, paying particular attention to the kinds of distortions and blind spots this perspective introduces when its gaze is directed at a Victorian woman poet. Despite modernisms, my version of twentieth-century Anglo-American literary modernism is that of “good-old, bad-old” Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, with Virginia Woolf included as she often was on “great books” syllabi, as a lone woman; I also understand this version to include the New Critical methodology that was inspired by and helped disseminate modernist poetry and values. In the first section, I examine New Critical reception of Rossetti (or rather, the lack thereof) and the feminist response to modernist and New Critical methodologies as applied to women’s writing more generally, and I identify a resultant paucity of textualist readings of some of Rossetti’s major poems (a paucity particularly noticeable in comparison with the wealth of



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such readings devoted to Baudelaire). With this relative deficit in mind, I engage in some modernist- and New Critical-inflected readings of poems—readings, that is, that focus largely on “the texts themselves” but which also bring these texts into conversation with some key modernist poetic values and formulations. In the subsequent section, I revisit some of the logic underlying Anglo-American modernism’s simultaneous inability to acknowledge Rossetti as a poet and its internal pressure to do so, examining instances in which we see modernists “remember and forget” Rossetti. In conclusion, I turn to the critical opinions of Ford Madox Ford, a pivotal figure in the transition between the Victorian and Modern periods in the very literal sense that he turned from Victorian to Modern himself and, perhaps even more importantly for the story of modern poetry and poetics, “turned” (or rolled, of which more is discussed later) Pound on the same path. Ford’s oft-repeated if unremembered opinions that Christina Rossetti was the modern voice in nineteenth-century British poetry, of far greater lasting value than her brother; that she was the poet worthy of comparison to French “modern” authors Flaubert and Maupassant, that she thus helps to inaugurate “the prose tradition in verse”—close out the chapter. For reasons only touched upon by Gilbert and Gubar, it is a delicate matter to suggest—with Ezra Pound, though much against his grain—that there is “something of the modern cadence” in some of Christina Rossetti’s poems (a suggestion Pound in fact entertains only to reject). Such an argument risks suggesting—here Pound would more firmly agree—that the presence of a “modern cadence” in Rossetti’s poetry would render that poetry more valuable. For not entirely intuitive reasons, such an argument seems less likely to suggest, conversely, that the “modern” is more Victorian than we thought, although this position should by now be a familiar canard. These taxonomic distinctions should, furthermore, be less contentious now than ever, since we increasingly understand periods as multiple and recognize that literary techniques and forms overlap and yet signify differently across time and place. Yet it is also undeniable that, in general terms, Victorian poetry sounds very different from modern poetry, and that specifically the poetry of Christina Rossetti reads very differently from that of Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot—or Amy Lowell, H. D., or Marianne Moore, for that matter. Leading Victorianist critics, in fact, decry the practice of cross-period Victorian-Modern criticism because they feel it undermines and devalues distinctive features of Victorian poetry. Indeed, I have worried at times that I sound a good deal like a disgruntled Mrs. Bennet. In the scene from Pride and Prejudice I have



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in mind, Mrs. Bennet bristles at Mr. Darcy’s house-in-town snobbery; she takes umbrage at his assumption that a city like London offers more intricate characters as objects for study than a provincial town like Meryton. A few simple substitutions render Darcy an urban-centered modernist (retaining all advantages of gender and power generally ascribed to such a character). Mrs. Bennet shifts seamlessly to a caricature of a defensive, close-minded, less worldly, and less intellectual female apologist for the Victorian era. (Reasonable Elizabeth is cast as rational mediator and therefore cuts a less immediately recognizable figure on the critical scene.) Bingley: I did not know before that you . . . were a studier of [poems]. It must be an amusing study. Elizabeth: Yes; but intricate [poems] are the most amusing. . . . Darcy: [Victorian poetry]. . . . can in general supply but few subjects for such a study. In [Victorian poetry] you move in a very confined and unvarying society. Elizabeth: But [poems] themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them forever. “Yes indeed,” cried Mrs. Bennet, offended by his manner of mentioning [Victorian poetry]. “I assure you there is quite as much of that going on in [Victorian poetry] as in [modern].”3

I have worried about becoming the Mrs. Bennet of Christina Rossetti’s distinctly un-urban poetry, insisting with brio that her poems “dine with four-and-twenty families” and are therefore as varied (or modern) as the urban centers with which literary modernism is most associated. Part of the humor of the scene, of course, derives from the way Mrs. Bennet unwittingly accepts Darcy’s premise that intricacy and variety are primary categories of value. She thus argues, essentially, that the country is just as urban as anywhere else—when, by definition, that is precisely what the country is not—and she advances none of the particular advantages of rural or provincial living in Meryton’s defense. By analogy, what I tend to refer to as a “Victorians are so modern” argument risks accepting if only arguendo the logic and critical premises of the twentieth-century modernists who set out to define themselves in opposition to Victorian poetry and thus systematically to devalue it. It allows the term “modern” to serve as shorthand for the qualities on which evaluative judgments should be based, and the twentieth-century understanding of that term defines it in opposition to the “old-fashioned” Victorian era, as we have seen. Scholars of Victorian poetry and particularly Victorian poetry by women



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would thus have good reason to challenge modernist poetic values such as innovation, formal complexity, and difficulty as sexist and elitist—since they often were, as articulated and applied—and instead establish alternative categories of value. A further difficulty with the “Victorians are so modern” argument, however, arises from the fact that poetic values such as innovation, experimentation, and formal complexity are thoroughly typical of the Victorian period, as Isobel Armstrong has long since established. Furthermore, although these strategies generate far different forms and focus on different poetic techniques and devices from those favored by modernist practitioners, innovation and experimentation are nonetheless ubiquitous in the work of Victorian-era women poets on both sides of the Atlantic, as Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson have demonstrated.4 In light of such arguments, to cede this poetic ground to the twentieth-century modern places a limit on the kinds of innovation, experimentation, and formal complexity these terms are able to name. Along these lines, in this chapter I challenge one critical assumption I see unchallenged in the Gilbert and Gubar study: when they argue that form is “a men’s club,” this critical logic accepts what it critiques as the underlying premise of modernism: that a formalist poetics excludes women. That is, it is incontrovertible that formalist poetics as often articulated has historically excluded women, whatever the practices of women poets actually have been. Pound and Eliot certainly did much to promote the careers of Mina Loy, H. D., and Marianne Moore, but these women were presented as exceptions and valued within a masculinist articulation of a “hard” poetics that eschewed “feminine” softness of tone and sentiment. I argue, however, that had modernist critics been able to consider Rossetti’s poetry in Goblin Market and Other Poems by the standards they themselves identified, had they been able to judge, as their critical inheritors would insist, on “the text itself” independent of the period and gender of its writer, they would have found much to value. Furthermore, in the case of Pound and even Woolf, they did, in fact, read and respond to Rossetti’s work and they did, in fact, discover in her “something of the modern cadence” as they defined it. For both writers, this identification with a Victorian spinster poetess proved challenging to their understanding of themselves as modern, a state of affairs responsible for some telling awkwardness on the part of both critics. Before delving into these moments of modernist reception, I examine several Rossettean texts with reference to poetic and textual values variously understood as “modernist” from the twentieth-century perspective. To Gilbert and Gubar’s “twin strategies of excavation and



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innovation”; “linguistic innovation”; puns, allusions, and “arcane and fractured forms” (which, along with collage, I discussed with relation to “Goblin Market” in chapter 5), I add the dissolution or receding of self in poetry, or “impersonality.” Drawing on the Continental tradition most fully embodied by Mallarmé, I include also a yearning for language “as such,” paired with a trend toward poetic abstraction—in the aesthetic rather than the philosophical or metaphysical sense of the word—framed by semantic withholding and negation. In Rossetti, I argue, these qualities arise in tension with and in transgressive relation to the then dominant ethos of expressive lyric subjectivity and the gendering of poetic form as male. An analogous tension pits her typically Pre-Raphaelite interest in detail and material representation against her religious suspicion of the worldly. Thus, whereas in “Goblin Metrics” I argued that period poetic theory did not understand formal and metrical engagement as a withdrawal from moral and political meaning and argued that in her title poem Rossetti explores hybrid and multiply transgressive poetic forms as alternative means of material engagement, the poems I discuss here tend increasingly to the ideal of pure poetry most associated with French modernism. For Rossetti, furthermore, gender emerges as a key structure and motivating factor in the development of this ideal. For this concluding chapter, I have selected texts from the Goblin Market collection that refine, develop, or mediate between the hermetic restraint of the “corpse” genre I examine in chapter 4 and the exuberant violence of the title poem that occupied me in chapter 5. Structurally, then, Goblin Market and Other Poems explores the relations between such polarities in a way that parallels Baudelaire’s flights between “Spleen” and “Ideal” in Les Fleurs du mal. Although Rossetti makes less of the performance and agony of self-contradiction, her collection, too, features experiments in competing and contradictory poetic, social, and spiritual modes. My comparative focus in this chapter is cross-century and cross-period rather than cross-Channel, but these decontextualized readings attest that poetic elements associated with twentieth-century AngloAmerican poetic modernism should be understood as arising within a “nineteenth-century modern” as well, developing differently but in tandem in England and France. And, without contradiction, these readings argue that we could consider these elements intrinsic to a counter-strain within Victorian poetics—a counter-strain I have found best represented by Christina Rossetti’s first collection. Modernist prejudices based on period and gender, however, complemented the gendered framework of Victorian poetics and Rossetti’s own stealthy practice to allow this counter-strain to pass all but unnoticed through much of the twentieth century as well.



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M ISS UNDERSTA NDING P OETRY 1938 For the sheer nastiness of their dismissive tone, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks are hard to beat.

The question of form in relation to Victorian women’s poetry began as vexed, and to a great extent remains so. As I discussed in chapter 4, Rossetti’s contemporaries—including even her brothers—understood women’s verse as emotional or devotional expression that occupied or filled poetic forms but did not generate them. In that context, I drew on Armstrong’s account of the gendering of Victorian poetics, which details how expressive theory influenced both men and women writers but presents women’s poetry in particular as restricted, at least in theory, to the “distinct sphere of feeling, sensitivity and emotion quite apart from the sphere of thought and action occupied by men.”5 Armstrong cites William Michael Rossetti who, while certainly one of his sister’s great champions, nonetheless typifies these gendered attitudes in his critique of her predecessor, Felicia Hemans. He argues that “[h]er sources of inspiration being genuine, and the tone of her mind being feminine in an intense degree, the product has no lack of sincerity” but gives the impression of a “cloying flow. . . . one might sum up the weak points in Mrs. Hemans’ poetry by saying that it is not only feminine poetry . . . but female poetry”; “feminine poetry” is associated with “fineness” and “charm” while “female poetry” gives a “monotone of sex” that stems from the “scrupulous female mind: and which we may most rightly praise that they favor over poetical robustness, or even perfection in literary form.”6 W. M. Rossetti here maintains a marked rhetorical distinction between poetry and minds with gendered attributes, on the one hand, and poetry and minds that are somehow essentially sexed, like body parts, on the other. The “tone” of Hemans’ mind is “feminine,” which produces “sincerity” (a gender-typical positive) but also “cloying flow,” a description the bodily, material suggestion of which seems to tip the scales from “feminine” to the more essential “female” poetry, product of a “female” mind. The female mind, being “scrupulous,” tends away from more masculine “robustness” and even away from “literary form.” Typical of the pervasive rhetoric that associates women’s poetry with liquidity (especially tears) in need of an encasing, external shape (a rhetorical trend I also discuss in greater detail in chapter 4), W. M. Rossetti’s commentary rehearses the ubiquitous stereotypes and premises that will become the basis for a feminist critique of “form” as a masculinist category. This prejudice is born out in the rhetorical and critical 10.1057/9780230101258 - Poetics en passant, Anne Jamison


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choices of the New Criticism, which in turn led feminist critics to eschew formal analysis and seek alternative categories of value. Toril Moi, for example, critiques Gilbert and Gubar’s reading of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, exposing what I would call a “Mrs. Bennet problem”—that is, Moi argues that their reading tacitly accepts a system of evaluation that excludes that which they wish to value. Shelley writes of collecting the Sybil’s scattered leaves, in order, as Gilbert and Gubar emphasize, to transmit them in a more cohesive form. Moi sees this image as “a parable of [Gilbert and Gubar’s] understanding of the woman writer under patriarchy,” focusing on the following passage: “the body of her precursor’s art, and thus the body of her own art lies in pieces around her, dismembered, dis-remembered, disintegrated. How can she remember it and become a member of it, join and rejoin it. . . .” According to Moi, privileging the holistic and expressing dismay at the disjunctive define “the story of the woman artist” in New Critical terms—terms based on categories of unity that deconstructive and psychoanalytic critics have found to be exclusively phallic: “A fragmented conception of self or consciousness would seem to Gilbert and Gubar the same as a sick or dis-eased self. The good text is an organic whole. . . . But this emphasis on integrity and totality as an ideal for women’s writing can be criticized precisely as patriarchal—or, more accurately, a phallic construct.”7 In fact, Moi complains more generally that “Anglo-American feminism . . . is still laboring under the traditional patriarchal values of New Criticism.”8 Kate Millet alone is celebrated in this regard: “in courageous opposition to the New Critics, Millet agued that social and cultural context must be studied if literature was to be properly understood.” 9 It should be noted that René Wellek and Austin Warren argued early on that “the common divorce between literary criticism and literary history has been detrimental to both,” but such moments notwithstanding, the New Criticism—long the most broadly influential source of sustained textualist and formalist critique—is widely understood as inimical to feminist critique on the grounds that both its methodologies and evaluative categories are inherently sexist.10 However unfair it may be to reduce the New Criticism to a monolithic embodiment of dehistoricized patriarchy (it was surely at least a varied panoply of dehistoricized patriarchy), it is undeniable that the contributions of women, on the one hand, and Victorian poets, on the other, received short shrift. Thus, as Jerome McGann observes, to survey twentieth-century commentary on Rossetti is to “discover . . . that New Criticism ignored her work”; the subsequent analysis makes clear that these later critics shared a number of W. M. Rossetti’s assumptions



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about gender and poetic “vigor” or “robustness.”11 A cursory glance at Brooks and Warren’s tremendously influential Understanding Poetry provides ample illustration of the way in which categories of period and gender signify in the rhetoric and judgments of the New Criticism.12 Out of some 230 poems, this widely assigned anthology includes eleven female-authored poems (fewer than 5 percent) by a total of six women writers. Of these texts, four are by twentiethcentury writers Amy Lowell, H. D., and Marianne Moore, two are by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, four are by Emily Dickinson, and one is by Adelaide Anne Procter. Of these, only two poems—one by Procter and one by Dickinson—are the object of Brooks and Warren’s commentary. But while the authors clearly admire Dickinson, they include Procter—who is, in strictest terms, the only Victorian woman writer directly discussed, if we exclude Dickinson for living outside the Commonwealth—by way of negative example only: Even though the work of Adelaide Procter . . . was once greatly admired by Charles Dickens, most modern readers of poetry would find this poem bad. Most readers who admire it probably do so because they approve the pious sentiment expressed in it. Such readers go to poetry merely to have their own beliefs and feelings flattered. . . . Such readers do not go to poetry for anything that poetry, as poetry, can give them. . . . “The Pilgrims” can be appreciated only because of something the reader may bring to it (an uncritical and sentimental piety) and not because of anything it brings to the reader. A truly pious person who was also an experienced reader of poetry might, as a matter of fact, have his piety offended rather than sustained by this poem. He might feel it as stupid, trivial, and not worthy of the subject.13

This is clearly the kind of critical practice and tone that earned the New Criticism its status as bugbear. First, “of all the poems in all towns in all the world,” or, at least, of all the sophisticated, complex, innovative female-authored poems the Victorian period had to offer, the one they singled out for commentary begins: The way is long and dreary, The path is bleak and bare; Our feet are worn and weary, But we will not despair:

Procter’s meter is heavy, the rhymes, images, and lexicon are standard, and the sentiment, indeed, seems received. Of course, in keeping



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with New Critical conventions, Brooks and Warren do nothing to contextualize or historicize the prevailing poetic fashions or publication conditions—or even, for that matter, consider the effectiveness of employing a tired rhetoric and poetics to convey weariness. More recently, leading critics such as McGann, Prins, and Armstrong have proposed new ways of engaging and appreciating sentimental verse, arguing generally, with Armstrong, that women’s poetry long dismissed as sentimental should be recovered from the “policing” of what she calls a “Whig Aesthetic” and “genealogy” that understands this poetry as part of a progression into modern.14 Clearly, neither modernism nor the New Criticism that followed it made or followed any such proposals—Brooks and Warren are the police Armstrong complains of. For these readers and the generations trained in their tastes and methods, sentimental poetry is bad poetry, although the distinction they like to draw between “sentiment” and “real emotion” (like the “true piety” here) is never, in fact, defined. While there is nothing inherently wrong with citing a poem as an example of what not to do or what is not to be valued when building an argument advocating a particular kind of poetics or aesthetics—a similar practice explains the ubiquity of Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”—to make such an example the sole representative of a complex era smacks of dirty pool. If “Trees” were the only example of male-authored twentieth-century American poetry discussed in an anthology called Understanding Poetry, Brooks and Warren would likely call foul. Brooks and Warren, furthermore, do not even make good use of their negative example on their own terms; they insist that the poem is “bad” in absolute terms, but much of their critique is directed at readers who might enjoy the poem, not at “the text itself.” For not only is the poem “bad,” they argue, it is not self-sufficient (another way of saying “bad” in New Critical terms): it can be enjoyed only if the reader brings something to it. The discussion then shifts from poem to reader and reader’s morality: if the reader has this “something,” this necessary wherewithal to enjoy the poem, it doesn’t reflect well on her either poetically or morally. Such a reader is, furthermore, gendered, because categories like “dependency” and “sentiment”— especially “pious sentiment” that likes to be “flattered”—already suggest femininity. This feminized reader is further rendered superficial and not, after all, pious at all, since a “truly” pious person who also knows how to read poetry will be not just poetically but morally offended. But where has Procter’s poem gone? Intriguingly, Understanding Poetry’s representation of and engagement with nineteenth-century “Victorian-era” poetry by women



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maps onto another set of prejudices as well. Brooks and Warren’s evaluation of Dickinson and Procter maintains a distinction common in the reception of nineteenth-century British (Victorian) and American poetry of the same era (primarily Whitman and Dickinson); this distinction parallels the difference in responses to French and British (Victorian) poetry of the same era. Engaging a number of discussions transpiring on the pages of the journal Victorian Poetry, Virginia Jackson notes that “Victorian Poetry” as critical category came into being in America, in Edmund Clarence Stedman’s 1875 Victorian Poets and the later Poets of America (1885). In this context, Stedman defines a transatlantic literary culture but defines it in terms of its own belatedness, Jackson argues: “[w]hat Stedman articulated between ‘Victorian’ and ‘American’ poets was a notion of poetry itself as a slender wire stretching across the ocean during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, between a wide cultural circulation of traditional poetic genres and an emerging sense that those genres were outdated.”15 Jackson summarizes Stedman’s position—“British poetry of the nineteenth century may remain Victorian but, as literary criticism since Stedman seems to have decided, American poetry was destined to be Modern”—by way of arguing for a study of Victorian American poetry that restores Stedman’s sense of a nineteenth-century transatlantic literary culture but challenges his assumption of its “modern” destiny, an assumption she argues has led to this poetry’s being subsumed or overshadowed by modernist studies.16 For my purposes, however, this incident accentuates the extent to which “Victorian” as a term is fraught with difficulties for the comparatist, since nationally based tensions are always subsumed within it; it dates and isolates British poetry in a way that allows poetry of other nations during the same era to be modern, and imposes a false sense of isolation on what was a cross-Channel as well as a transatlantic literary culture. Furthermore, as we see, even at the term “Victorian Poetry’s” inception it always already designated a formal and generic datedness. In short, just as there are reasons feminism might mount a critique of New Critical practice, Victorianists might rightly be suspicious of a revaluation of Victorian poetry in terms of modernism. It is also true that just as modernists hated sentimentality, Victorian readers, especially the readers of women poets, embraced it; as my readings of Rossetti in chapter 4 suggest, sentimental expression was understood as the default setting for a woman writer. I am, furthermore, in entire agreement with the field that advocates new ways of engaging nineteenthcentury sentimental and expressive verse. Nonetheless, it was hardly



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the universal poetic mode and, I would argue, to include Rossetti in that tradition simply because her gender locates her there ignores not only poetic evidence but her own repeated assertions. Rossetti may well belong in the tradition of Armstrong’s “Whig Aesthetic.” As a matter of fact, as Constance Hassett points out, “Adelaide” Procter functioned as a “code for aesthetic feebleness” between Rossetti siblings, as her reading of an exchange from their correspondence makes clear: “Lowest Room pray eject if you really think such a course advantageous, though I can’t agree with you: still it won’t dismay me that you should do so; I am not stung into obstinacy even by the Isa and Adelaide taunt in which I acknowledge an element of truth.”17 The exchange pertains to the arrangement of Christina’s 1866 collection, and the “taunt” found parallels between the poem mentioned and Adelaide Procter, whom Hassett identifies as “one of the few poets whose work Christina is on record as being unimpressed with”; Christina’s admission of the “truth” in her brother’s comment admits, per Hassett, that “sections of her poem, taken out of context, can seem weakly domestic and moralized in Procter’s (and ultimately Hemans’s) own manner.”18 As her description of her “writing book” in Maude (discussed in my introduction), her intervention in the female-authored “dead woman” tradition (discussed in chapter 4), and her poetic triteness in the “modest maiden” section of “Goblin Market” (discussed in chapter 5) have already illustrated, Rossetti bears a conflicted relationship to the poetics of her female predecessors and contemporaries, and she consistently both inscribes herself into a women’s tradition and distances herself from that tradition in terms of form, aesthetics, and expressivity. In fact, her distaste for sentimentality and her exacting formal and aesthetic priorities are traits that align her with Brooks and Warren’s snobbery. She could look down on Victorian women’s poetry with the best of them—but there is certainly less of a chance that she is looking down on it simply because it is female-authored. Indeed, Christina Rossetti’s alignment with this purported “Whig Aesthetic” may well challenge assumptions about any inherent gendered or political valence of those poetic values understood as modern. Whatever the affinities between Rossetti’s poetry and the critical and poetic schools that followed her, to engage her reception history is to “discover that the New Criticism ignored her work.” This gap explains a shift in my methodology. Throughout the preceding chapters, I have contextualized Rossetti’s and Baudelaire’s work with relation to their immediate poetic predecessors, contemporaries, and other theoretical and popular writings. I am dedicated to the project of historicizing poetic forms and modes. I find that unlike Baudelaire,



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however, Rossetti has not been dehistoricized enough. That is, while generations of Baudelaire critics with a strong and tenacious textualist focus have guaranteed a wealth of close critical readings of any number of his poems, no such critical archive exists for Rossetti’s work. Since the most influential school of textualist criticism to focus on literature in English grew out of a modernist poetics and even practice that was demonstrably misogynist and anti-Victorian, this exclusion is unsurprising. Certainly, more recent textualist studies of Rossetti have since emerged—the most extensive being Hassett’s Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style—that take a more nuanced position vis-à-vis historical and cultural context.19 Here, however, I am taking Christina Rossetti “out of context” (her own) and inserting her into another critical context, giving her the “just the text, ma’am” treatment New Critics might have, had they been able to reach her work through the fog of gender and period prejudice in which they (perhaps necessarily) operated.20 New Criticism has many flaws as a critical methodology; because of its sexism and the subsequent feminist critique, however, many of Rossetti’s texts did not ever receive the sustained, focused, and uncluttered attention to language, form, and detail that were the real benefits this methodology offered to readers of poetry, whatever the limits of its ideological underpinnings.

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Far from sentimental, much of Rossetti’s project in Goblin Market and Other Poems investigates non-expressive modes of language, and she explores notions of form quite different from the “container for liquid feelings model” critics like Ruskin suggested for her. Like Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du mal, Rossetti begins the process toward formal innovation by complicating, or skewing, the relationship of familiar poetic forms—as in “Song”—and tropes—as in the dead women poems generally—to their topical or representational referent. At times—as in “At Home”—the dead speaker enables Rossetti to explore the sensual language and forms that attract her without herself being implicated in the “fruits” of this language. She distances sensual language from its content much as the male speakers in the male-authored poems wish to cleanse the beautiful female forms from their “staining” subjectivity. This approach, first developed with relation to the evolving genre of dead speaker poems, returns in another important subgenre within the Goblin Market collection: the seasonal or natural cycle poems in which I include the “Spring” poems and the important “Winter



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Rain.” These poems, all composed in the late 1850s, contain some of Rossetti’s most sensual, erotic imagery and sonority, all strangely displaced or hollowed, replicating in this way the logic of the beauty of a corpse, a display of presence that indicates that which is absent. “Spring,” for example, exploits the formal and tonal qualities of sensual, sexually evocative language by means of absence or the affect of loss, even when the text seems most to celebrate presence and fullness. The poem approaches this highly serious thematic material through language play, however. Dormancy and doubt launch the poem, but tonality and rhythm (as well as echoes of the goblin men, in the context of the collection, at least) provide a counterpoint: Frost-locked all the winter, Seeds, and roots, and stones of fruits, What shall make their sap ascend That they may put forth shoots? (1–4)

The first words introduce the tension between death and life, absence and fullness, through a rhetorical device similar to what we have seen in “At Home,” where “stood full” retains the resonance of “stood still.” Here, “Frost-locked” combines compound epithet with compound by substitution: the familiar (“land-locked”) is deformed and rendered strange while the new image gains in impact on the strength of a known pattern and its resonances. The seeds beneath the ground are “land-locked” inside or under the “land” or ground. The more familiar expression could not convey this literal sense because of interference from its established sense of isolation from bodies of water, while the nonce “frost-locked” retains the sense of “shut in or enclosed.” This literalization of the absent yet indicated “landlocked” approaches the kind of strategy Poe valorizes in the “hidden pun.” The word’s structure, however, suggests a different intertext; during this period, Rossetti resorts frequently to compound epithet, evidence of the influence of Tennyson, with whom she also shared both a taste for sensual, mellifluous language and a marked uneasiness about its import. This uneasiness is readily apparent in “Spring.” The rhythm and musicality of the first lines do suggest a “hidden life” in these buried, “frost-locked” things, but this life in turn tells another story: Tips of tender green, Leaf, or blade, or sheath; Telling of the hidden life



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Throughout the poem, just as absence and expectation produce life and a rich poetic language, life—new birth, quick movement, mating—presages death and condenses language. Rossetti’s “hidden life” is far from the yearning quality of Matthew Arnold’s 1852 “Buried Life,” however (“Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet/ Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet”), in which the speaker expresses frustration with verbal play and expresses an earnest desire to integrate the inner and outer worlds, to give expression to the tears. If anything, Rossetti seems to celebrate the separation, the disjunction between bright material surface and the inner life nursed by negativity and death, a disjunction that maps readily, if somewhat incompletely, onto the poem. In the following lines, “Blows the thawwind pleasantly/ Drips the soaking rain,” the disruptive syntax works together with the plosive consonant clusters of the verbs to create the feeling of energy and vigor in the “thaw-wind” (which is pleasant, despite its aural associations with a raw wind) and rain. The sun, however, surely the most strongly determined symbolic representation of life as full presence, does not match the rain in energy: “By fits looks down the waking sun” gives a comparatively weak verb weakened further by an adverbial phrase, a dramatic taming of the energy of the other elements, and a sun only half-present. We soon see, however, that the sun’s only partial presence is a necessary advantage; where rain and wind have the power to birth life from the womb of Death, the sun in its fullness promises only destruction. What appears throughout the second stanza to celebrate new life turns at the close to place greatest value on that time in spring when the winds and rains have not yet succeeded—a celebration of potential not fulfilled, of life before life: “There is no time like Spring,/ When life’s alive in everything,/ Before new nestlings sing” and particularly “Before the sun has power/ To scorch the world up in his noontide hour.” This season-happening is so compressed that it must be said together: There is no time like Spring, Like Spring that passes by; There is no life like Spring-life born to die,— (29–31)

“Spring-life” is compressed and coiled, like the compounds the poet employs, suggestive of the other “spring” the title puns on. The existence of this “Spring-life,” however, is not only compressed, it



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is questionable—grammatically, the lines may mean that Spring and Spring-life are unique, but they may equally mean that Spring and Spring-life do not exist. If the disjunction between surface and “content” of the poem is meant to replicate the relationship between, say, husk and kernel or social form and inner self, the existence of that “kernel” or inner self is surely called into question. In “Winter Rain” as well, the season of death and dormancy fosters life. This poem is similarly replete with sexually suggestive imagery: Every valley drinks, Every dell and hollow: Where the kind rain sinks and sinks, Green of Spring will follow. (1–4)

The syntactically strange “Yet a lapse of weeks/ Buds will burst their edges” (5–6) reinforces the imagery of sexual reproduction with a strikingly literal reference to fertilization and gestation time leading to birth. This same construction, however, elides the moment of birth and fruition from the scope of the poem, just as the lines “But for fattening rain/ We should have no flowers” (9–14) indicate the necessity of fertilizing fluid for subsequent bloom and so include the signs “rain” and “flowers” yet syntactically and logically exclude them from describing any full presence in the poem’s referential dimension. The poem contains the words, forms, associations of these words of plenitude, but they are circumscribed by negation: they appear not as signs pointing to things, but as cautionary tales of absence. “Full” language—like “full” poetry—can be deceptive only: words designate absences, while absence generates form. In a move related to her employment of sensual language framed by negativity and absence, Rossetti in another mode deploys the language and forms of courtship, exposing and drawing upon the simultaneous emptiness and overabundance of significance these forms can entail, form in either case out of balance with both purported and actual content. In the tart “No thank you, John,” the speaker plays on sexual codes and formulae, always insisting on her right to negate and be believed. “I have no heart?—Perhaps I have not” or “Don’t call me false, who owned not to be true.” The poem’s logic turns on the incompatibility of assumptions about women’s speech in courtship and women’s poetry. In courtship and flirtation, a woman’s “no” is understood to mean “yes” and reticence, suitably shy desire, while in her poetry, unmediated truth of feeling is understood as sole inspiration, methodology, and outcome. The infamously idiosyncratic “Winter: My Secret” likewise plays on courtship codes and received



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notions about feminine coyness to form a positive articulation of a poetics that may choose to withhold not only content but even its unambiguous absence. Like a number of Rossetti’s poems, this text centers on the radical ambiguity of its own questionable center and takes as its occasion a refusal to express any core of truth or emotion or even to confirm or deny that such a core exists: I tell my secret? No indeed, not I: Perhaps some day, who knows? But not today; it froze, and blows, and snows, And you’re too curious: fie! You want to hear it? well: Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell.

The first line of the poem provides a graphic replica of the poetic self as understood in an expressive poetics: the barriers of the “I” or self contain a “secret” that the language of the poem can then express. In this case, however, the center or core of the line is a posed question and a negative answer (“secret? No”) bound not by an expressive self but by a self that counters “I tell” with “not I.” Poetic voice thus emerges paired not with the affirmation or expression of self but with the self’s negation. The related tension between positive and negative core content (“secret? No”) collects in the caesura, the formal equivalent of a poetically productive absence, which is lengthened and intensified but also bridged by the tonality and rhythm of the question-and-answer pairing. The first line thus articulates an internal space it specifically does not open but rather covers or veils, a space which may be empty or filled and so prefigures the very uncertainty that fuels and structures the poem. This core structure is then replicated in the relationship between the first two stanzas: the first stanza—like “I tell my secret?” of the first line—seems on the semantic level to affirm the existence of a withheld and unexpressed secret that could be told were the “I” willing, while the second stanza counters with a withdrawal of potential content and a speculation on an absence: Or, after all, perhaps there’s none: Suppose there is no secret after all, But only just my fun.

The double diminution and reduction (“only just”) of “my secret” to “my fun” cloaks and seems to soften the otherwise potentially startling linkage of “fun” with absence and internal void of self. Through the series of feints it produces around such striking and serious



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assertions, the poem’s form—like the clothing it next evokes—covers and softens disturbing ambiguity but also presents itself, as opposed to any interiority or content, as that which is first seen and most noticeable. The poem also ironizes this inner/outer structure as a model for poetry, however. If poetic form is likened to clothing, then the desired “content” it obscures, beautifies, and renders desirable by withholding is not an emotional or intellectual interiority but a body—another layer of form and material. This structure aligns with the Benjaminian sense of the allegorical—glossed by Adorno as a lock to which there is no key—and also with Paul de Man’s development of the allegorical as an important rhetorical structure in poems like Baudelaire’s “Spleen II”. Here, however, gender and social formulae frame what in these male-authored texts seem like purely poetic and rhetorical structures; the woman’s clothing described identifies not only the speaker but the poem itself as a male reader’s female object of desire, and casts the text-reader relationship in terms of flirtation, a behavior in which the roles are set by social gender conventions and followed automatically, unthinkingly, their light tone not acknowledging the serious consequences success might have. Hassett and other commentators contend that “the mere profession of a secret premises a self that can have, tell, or withhold it”; Hassett further argues that “the speaker’s hint that the secret reduces to ‘just my fun’ is too gleefully self-delighting to be accepted as straightforward denial” but rather is “a covert declaration that a talent for nonsense is integral to the secret-keeper’s identity.” The poem’s language play is the source of the poet’s elation, and “[h]erein lies the genuine evasiveness of this evasive poem; it is Rossetti herself who is so unabashedly delighted with the elements of language.”21 If this is a self, it seems likely the self of the “poet mind” Rossetti references elsewhere, but given the parallels the poem draws between male/female roles in courtship and the reader/poem relationship, it seems the lyric “I” may as easily be read as the voice of the poem rather than the poet: that is, we may read the poem as a statement of poetic theory. The poem asserts that it is fully within its power to disclose or withhold meaning, and may keep out the “pecks” of the reader/auditor as long as it sees fit. It performs its primary purposes—to engage its materials; to offer an inducement for the reader to engage in these materials; and to tease and prolong this enjoyment by withholding a semantic fulfillment that would close off the game, performing “a fantasy that holds the probabilities of disclosure and nondisclosure in ambiguous suspension.”22 “These guesses,” the poem seems to say, “I want to perpetuate them.”



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In a related mode, Rossetti employs a technique that inverts her employment of evacuated or negated sensuality: avowed semantic or structural centrality often turns on the most affectless, least sensual words imaginable. In yet another “spring” poem (literally entitled “Another Spring”) a single such word provides the occasion, the unifying structural component, and the avowed (yet unrevealed) kernel or central meaning, as identified by the third stanza. The word is “if,” and just as rich sensual language often forms the emptied body of her text, such bodiless, almost purely syntactical words are foregrounded and densely packed with significance. The poem takes place entirely in the conditional, and after having discoursed pleasantly enough on the spring flowers the speaker intends to enjoy right away and the baby animals she will surely listen to should she ever get the chance, by the third stanza the speaker abandons the concrete sensual imagery she has used to depict the unlikely future for a level of abstraction that accompanies the proximity of the present. Insofar as the present enters the poem at all, it resides in the past collapsed into the poor potential of the future: “If I might see another Spring—/ Oh, stinging comment on my past/ That all my past results in ‘if’.” At this third repetition of the refrain, the poem breaks off and commits exegesis on itself, reading its language and grammar as a “stinging comment” on the past life of the speaker, turning the uncertain potential of “if” into an indictment of a life that did not produce more certainty, more realization. This reading the poem offers of itself is slightly skewed, however, since the line that precedes it begins with “if” and ends with “Spring,” not the other way around—it is the line that identifies the “comment,” the purported indictment of the speaker’s past—that ends or “results” in “if” and breaks off without any hint of “then,” thus performing the structure it singles out as indemnifying. Structure thus belies narrative or significative value and ends by the suggestion that desire and potential not likely to be fulfilled are in fact beneficial to the poem (although not necessarily to the speaker) which has little to do with presence. The poem “May” also exploits the thematic link between spring and potentiality, here with a typically Rossettean pun accentuating the link in the title. Like “Another Spring,” this poem employs both negated sensuality and signifying abstraction: I cannot tell you how it was; But this I know: it came to pass Upon a bright and breezy day When May was young; ah pleasant May!



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I cannot tell you what it was; But this I know: it did but pass. It passed away with sunny May, With all sweet things it passed away, And left me old, and cold, and grey.23

The poem takes as its subject an event unspecified, unexplained, and unnamed, introduced as in “Winter: My Secret” by an “I” self-construed as not telling—although here, in contrast to the voice in “Winter: My Secret,” this reticence is cast as a voice unable, rather than unwilling, to divulge. A presence identified only as “it” “passes” through the poem, which thus may be said to focus on an indefinite and genderless pronoun without referent, identifying characteristic or affect. Conversely, textual moments of rich sensuality and concrete imagery in the first stanza are framed by syntactic and temporal double negation, a structure that anticipates organic fruition and attendant abandonment as equally natural and inevitable stages. These stages, furthermore, serve only to mark the priority of the nebulous “it”—they are relevant only as afterthoughts and are thus strangely outdated before they can be said to have happened: again, the language of organic life supplies body but not significance. Otherwise, in the poem about not telling, the undefined “it” seems simply to have occurred (“it came to pass”), but the commonplace is deftly literalized to mean “it came [in order] to pass,” its passing having become the sum total of its existence: “it did but pass”—it didn’t do anything else. “It” is fleeting, as opposed to the speaker who remains. Passing in the poem thus equates occurrence and being with death; movement entails its own “passing,” and here the speaker is left static, stagnant, and without voice or language adequate to her object. The poem exists despite the untelling “I” ’s inability to articulate: “it” is language abstracted of selfhood and content, that which is ordered in rhythm, repetition, and syntax on the page, whose possibilities or “pleasant mays” only increase with the speaker’s inarticulation. Thus in her poetry for which the most readily available meaning seems to be a condemnation of self for not having acted, seized the day, come to fruition, and so on, the syntax and grammatical logic rather privilege even lost hope and potentiality over presence and actuality, emptiness over plenitude. “A Pause for Thought” immediately follows “May” in the 1862 collection and is similarly constructed around an unidentified and



As yet the poppies were not born Between the blades of tender corn; The last eggs had not hatched as yet, Nor any bird foregone its mate.

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I looked for that which is not, nor can be, And hope deferred made my heart sick in truth: But years must pass before a hope of youth Is resigned utterly. I watched and waited with a steadfast will: And though the object seemed to flee away That I so longed for, ever day by day I watched and waited still. Sometimes I said: This thing shall be no more; My expectation wearies and shall cease; I will resign it now and be at peace: Yet never gave it o’er. Sometimes I said: It is an empty name I long for; to a name why should I give The peace of all the days I have to live— Yet gave it all the same. Alas, thou foolish one! Alike unfit For healthy joy and salutary pain Thou knowest the chase useless, and again Turnest to follow it.24

The poem first identifies as its occasion and inspiration a specific, bounded impossibility. The utter impossibility of fulfillment is posited in the first lines, its articulation extended over the negation both of presence and potentiality. The impossibility of fulfillment primarily serves, however, to extend desire over time. “[H]ope deferred” and resignation (a phrase and mode with which Rossetti’s poetics have been frequently and powerfully associated) are extensions of this absence and impossibility. Resignation would end desire, but it does not occur; and while “hope deferred” may sicken the heart, it extends the poem. Although the “heart” is sick, furthermore, the “will” is strong and steadfast—in passivity, in “watching” and “waiting.” At this point, the logic of the poem begins to fold. What seems to be a reiteration of the will’s patience reads also like immobility and stubbornness: although the “object seemed to flee away,” the desiring subject does not move—“I watched and waited still”—as in, even then I didn’t go after it. Thus desire seems worth prolonging at all costs, desire is “longing,” temporal and verbal extension. In a further twist of logic, that which is initially invoked as nonexistent impossibility is here fleeing—an apparent possibility presented, rather, as having



undefined object (of desire) that is further characterized by its impossibility:

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been, but now on its way out. This slippage in time of the impossible to the passing may be an effect of perception, since it only “seemed” to flee. The perception of its fleeing, however, certainly implies its having existed and been in proximity to the subject. Nevertheless, this proximity is not included in the poem, which finds extension in desire, not fulfillment. The “I” here may be said to “wait” out any real possibility of fulfillment in exchange for the poem. In the next line, poetic utterance (in explicitly direct discourse) takes shape via the negation of an unnamed object: “This thing shall be no more.” Apparently, “that which is not” has here become “[t]his thing” and although the time of its being present (in a pattern by now familiar) is not represented in the poem, logic dictates that it “is”— since the speaker decrees that it “shall be no more.” The temporality of its being is impossible to pin down: the speaker “said”—uttered in the past—that “this thing” (the thing which “is not nor can be”) “shall be no more”—its existence seems circumscribed in the past, since it is precluded from the present, the possible, and the future. Although this might be seen to imply that “it” has existence only outside of language—a reading that would place the poem in line with the “pathological” expressive model Armstrong associates with female poets—“its” being coincides with “its” saying (accentuated by direct discourse) in two cases. Both claims by direct discourse suggest that “it” has no existence outside of language, that “it” is something like pure language, that it cannot coincide with that to which it refers; that is, it cannot coincide with things outside language. The “being no more” of “this thing” “shall” coincide with expectation’s “ceasing.” This negation, however, grammar tells us, never comes to pass—although it “is not,” it cannot have ceased to be, since the expectation of “it,” which prolongs “it,” has never ceased. So what is “it”? The speaker tells us: “It is an empty name I long for.” A certain conventional usage will easily allow the reading that the speaker longs for public fame, an “empty name” devoid of value. A closer reading reveals perhaps the desire for a different kind of “empty” name—a name devoid of sexual difference, which seems likewise impossible. The poem has been read in both ways. But the absolute abstraction of the poem, together with its position in the cluster of poems that compress prominence into grammatical particles rather than “names” or nouns, suggests the desire for pure language devoid of content—a name unfettered, without meaning—pure sign without fixed signification. This last speculation suggests a comparison with Stéphane Mallarmé, whose embrace of negation and abstraction in poetry certainly



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manifests itself in more extreme forms. In Mallarmé, the “I” is not just ambiguous, it is gone; the syntax is not just difficult or compressed, it is impossibly so, and language abstracted and framed by negation takes a central, uncontested position. Considered at once as form and material, language also becomes an indicator of semantic absence in moments like the opening of “Éventail de Mme Mallarmé”: “Avec comme pour langage/ Rien. . . .” While Rossetti does not approach this level of compression or abstraction, poems like “May” and “A Pause for Thought” concentrate an analogous attention on generally nondenotative and connotative linguistic particles: “if” and “it,” in general terms, “mean” through system and context, they locate and relate other denotative terms just as Mallarmé’s prepositions and conjunctions do. Their isolation and emphasis in Rossetti’s text require us to see them as words—potential meanings or emptinesses—rather than as facilitators and bridges to meaning and sense. Whereas in poems like “Spring” and “Goblin Market,” Rossetti registers a clear concern with perceptible, tactile language that is both directly referential and itself highly sensory, these “drier” poems indicate a different concern with language altogether, one that seems to look forward more to the deconstructive than to the Imagist. Curiously, Mallarmé and Rossetti come together (with, as I have argued in chapter 3, Baudelaire and Poe) in exploring language play for its potential power to free poetry from fixed modes of signification, instead emphasizing language’s status as aesthetically complex material. Mallarmé’s “serious play” is generally less playful in tone than Rossetti’s, but the well-known occasional poem “Salut” calls to mind parallels with the project and even some of the underlying logic of “Winter: My Secret.” First, the title “Salut” (“Toast”) locates the poem in a social setting and presents it as part of a prescribed social form: it is a toast, a category that suggests occasion and referent, both of which the poem withhold. Similarly, “Winter: My Secret” draws on expectations of courtship behavior and gestures toward a referent it simultaneously withholds. Again, Mallarmé’s compression is icy, while Rossetti is, as Hassett characterizes her voice in this poem, “gleefully garrulous.” In “Winter: My Secret,” Rossetti does not assert nothingness but rather holds it out as a tease—“perhaps there’s none”—while the poem’s continued virginity or eventual yielding to readerly penetration is clearly in play. Mallarmé, by contrast, begins with nothingness and insists on the continued virginity of the verse: “Rien, cette écume, vierge vers/ A ne désigner que la coupe.” The differences are clear, but curious parallels emerge that reflect back on each poem, showcasing each text from a different and



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unexpected perspective. Mallarmé’s virgin verse, for instance, recalls the thematics and poetics of female inviolateness that typify Rossetti’s corpse poems, while “virginity” invites us to see “Salut” in a courtship relationship with a potential reader/suitor. Furthermore, we see how works by Mallarmé and Rossetti evidence a felt tension between an idealized poetic autonomy and a contradictory acknowledgment of the reader’s role—a writerly concern more likely to be associated with Mallarmé than with Rossetti. Further comparisons yield further insights; Mallarmé likens his “virgin verse” to the substanceless foam in a glass of champagne, but Rossetti’s text’s emphasis on textiles and clothing (“a shawl/ A veil, a cloak, and other wraps”) reminds us that the “coupe” or cup—the supposed “all” that Mallarmé’s virgin verse designates—is, in fact, itself double: it is a “cut” of a suit, as we remember from the punning Coupeurs of Baudelaire’s journalistic youth and as Mallarmé, editor of La Dernière Mode, would certainly have in mind. A “coupe,” furthermore, is not just indicated or designated but also “designed” in English, the language Mallarmé studied, translated, and taught. One lesson to be learned from these cross-Channel comparisons generally is that male French modernists interested themselves in fashion far more than their female counterpart Rossetti, whose forays in that direction tended toward details of mourning outfits. In “Winter: My Secret,” however, she seems to see the parallels her French contemporaries also draw on, suggesting we consider poetry, like clothing, as a material object of design and construction that may simultaneously display and conceal. Like clothing, poetic language can be concentrated, dispersed, evacuated and displaced; indeed here, the poets also seem to share a sense that in poetry as in fashion, the play can be for high stakes. In the following section, I turn from texts by Rossetti to texts about Rossetti by Anglo-American modernists; I’d like to close here with some critical language that places Rossetti in dialogue with a poet also writing from that tradition. Nancy Gish’s analysis of the early T. S. Eliot and “the poetics of dissociation” resonates rhetorically with my readings of Rossetti in several striking instances.25 Gish notes that Eliot’s early work “depicts states of internal division, disorder, doubling,” states that have been understood in terms of Matthew Arnold’s “buried life”—also an important point of reference and contrast for Rossetti. Gish, however, associates these divisions of “voice, personae, sensibility, even personality” with pre-Freudian theories of dissociation. This theoretical framework would not, certainly, apply to Rossetti, but I would argue that a number of texts in Goblin Market and Other Poems do explore a range of dissociative strategies to develop “a way of depicting ‘modern’ states



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of consciousness in which desire is simultaneously present and absent, in which sensual and abstract converge. This poetic strategy helps explain the continuing fascination of readers with a poetry obsessed with death and etherized numbness, yet powerfully evocative in its sensation and emotion” (emphasis added).26 Although Eliot’s and Rossetti’s textual strategies diverge greatly, each poet develops modes that mobilize and enable these contradictions. Gish writes of Eliot that “[i]n these early poems desire is inseparable from the very conditions of existence and identity; it defines, by its exclusions, the limits of Eliot’s ostensible ‘I,’ a speaking voice dissociated from the sensation and emotion it articulates.”27 For Rossetti, I would emend this analysis to emphasize that “desire is inseparable from the very conditions of existence and identity” of the poem. The “I,” for Rossetti, is closer to the voice of the poem than the voice of the poet. Indeed, Rossetti writes of the “poet mind,” a mind that enables her poetry to explore conditions of consciousness and experience she herself would neither desire nor withstand. In her brief, sporadic comments on her poetic process, she clearly wishes to distance her poetic self from the thinking, feeling, faithful self she identifies as her own self; she wishes to indicate a difference in kind, although not an absolute dissociation. T. S. Eliot approaches these complex relations as follows: When . . . two gasses previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.28

At times, I would argue, Rossetti’s poet mind dreams of the autonomy and catalytic power Eliot claims for his “platinum.” One of the challenges to be faced in comparing Rossetti with Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Eliot, or Pound is that she does not write extensive commentary on her own poetic process or aesthetic beliefs. Most of her positions must be teased out of the poems themselves—which, as we have seen, do not make the matter simple. Her own insistence, however, on this autonomy of her poetic texts surely itself makes a statement that suggests her compatibility with the critical and poetic tradition most associated with the twentieth-century modernists.

M ODERNISM R EMEMBERS

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F ORGETS R OSSETTI

As my discussions above establish, Rossetti’s volume Goblin Market and Other Poems features poems driven by formal or material devices



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that will later be claimed and coded as “modern.” If we take poetic modernism on its own terms and abstract the poetry from its poet, then Rossetti’s poetry indeed does have something of “the modern cadence.” Indeed, the exclusion of a number of poems by Christina Rossetti from a developing tradition of poetic modernism occurs in violation of this modernism’s own principles of poetic value, impersonality, and innovation. For modern writers and for generations of critics educated in their wake, however, it remains difficult to recognize the spinster as a poet; more than awkward, to embrace the Victorian as the modern. Since Pound defined creative thought as being “like the male cast of the human seed” and associated literary form with masculine “hardness,” we can see why acknowledging Rossetti as a poetic predecessor would pose problems.29 For Woolf, a modern woman much concerned with this double identity, the acknowledgment is more urgent but no less troubled. Why these difficulties remain so in force today is less clear; perhaps the intransigence of these oppositions are best understood as a testament to the entrenched staying power of a gendered poetics that the moderns only inherited, as did we. Indeed, a plain, largely unadorned comparison of two modernist reactions to Rossetti demonstrates just how powerful and deforming a force this gendered understanding of poetic innovation has been. Ezra Pound several times singles out elements of Rossetti’s work as characterized by qualities he values, but does so almost nervously, deflecting this positive evaluation or simply glancing off it to deny its validity for reasons that remain uninvestigated. In discussing, for example, the qualities of “hardness” and “softness” (he likes “hardness,” of course) Pound evokes Rossetti: “[t]here is definite statement in George Herbert, and likewise in Christina Rossetti, but I do not feel that they have much part in this essay. I do not feel that their quality is really the quality I am seeking here to define.”30 Not surprisingly, Pound finds the woman poet not “hard” in the way he is thinking, but he does not elaborate on how her “statement” differs from the “hardness” he has in mind and immediately abandons any further discussion of her poetry. Similarly, in a discussion of Ford Madox Ford, Pound nearly writhes on the page in confronting “Mr. Hueffer’s” understanding that poetry is “ ‘all Christina Rossetti’ ”: As for Christina, Mr. Hueffer is a better critic than I am, and I would be the last to deny that a certain limpidity and precision are the ultimate qualities of style; yet I cannot accept his opinion. Christina had these qualities, it is true—in places, but they are to be found also in Browning and even in Swinburne at rare moments. Christina very



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Mr. Hueffer may have found certain properties of style first, for himself, in Christina, but others have found them elsewhere, notably in Arnaut Daniel and in Guido, and in Dante, where Christina herself would have found them. Still there is no denying that there is less of the ore rotundo in Christina’s work than in that of her contemporaries, and that there is also in Hueffer’s writing a clear descent from such passages as: I listened to their honest chat: Said one: “To-morrow we shall be Plod plod along the featureless sands And coasting miles and miles of sea.” Said one: “Before the turn of tide We will achieve the eyrie-seat.” Said one: “To-morrow shall be like To-day, but much more sweet.” We find the qualities of what some people are calling “the modern cadence” in this strophe, also in: Sometimes I said: ‘It is an empty name I long for; to a name why should I give The peace of all the days I have to live?’— Yet gave it all the same.31

Pound does not discuss here, however, what “qualities” of cadence those are nor how they are modern. Nor does he discuss precisely what “man” is being asked for “faculties” that “he” does not possess—since he just has acknowledged, however grudgingly, that “Christina” has “the ultimate qualities of style.” In any case, the discussion ends here. Pound’s near approaches, glancing blows, his simultaneous awareness and denial of Rossetti’s relevance—these elements of the essay stage a convincing performance of the internal struggle between prejudice and poetic value, with the former winning only by quitting the game. What we might call Pound’s “gender problem” is only half the issue—then, of course, there is the “period problem” and the fact that he had cut his poetic teeth on the Pre-Raphaelites although not, significantly, on the “Brotherhood’s” sole female quasi-member. Pound credits Ford, in fact, with setting him on the path away from what Hugh Kenner calls “Rossettean tosh” and toward a more recognizable



often sets my teeth on edge—but so, for that matter, does Mr. Hueffer. But it is the function of criticism to find what a given work is, rather than what it is not. It is also the faculty of a capital or of high civilization to value a man for some rare ability, to make use of him and not to hinder him or itself by asking of him faculties which he does not possess. [emphasis added]

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twentieth-century modernism. Although positive, this essay does not give the same sense of Ford’s importance to Pound’s development as a poet that Pound accords him elsewhere. By Pound’s account, this influence is singular in both its intensity and its form. Pound visited Ford to serve for a time as the older man’s secretary and, per Kenner, “Pound brought with him a presentation copy of his recent Canzoni. Ford rolled on the ground.”32 Pound reflects at some length on this roll and its reverberations in his 1939 obituary for his friend: I have put it down as personal debt to my forerunners that I have had five, and only five, useful criticisms of my writing in my lifetime, one from Yeats, one from Bridges, one from Thomas Hardy, a recent one from a Roman Archbishop and one from Ford, and that last the most vital, or at any rate on par with Hardy’s. That Ford was almost an halluciné few of his intimates can doubt. He felt until it paralysed his efficient action, he saw quite distinctly the Venus immortal crossing the tram tracks. He inveighed against Yeats’ lack of emotion as, for him, proved by Yeats’ so great competence in making literary use of emotion. And he felt the errors of contemporary style to the point of rolling (physically, and if you look at it as mere superficial snob, ridiculously) on the floor of his temporary quarters in Giessen when my third volume displayed me trapped, fly-papered, gummed and strapped down in a jejune provincial effort to learn, mehercule, the stilted language that then passed for ‘good English’ in the arthritic milieu that held control of the respected British critical circles . . . And that roll saved me at least two years, perhaps more. It sent me back to my own proper effort, namely, using the living tongue (with younger men after me), though none of us has found a more natural language than Ford did.33

It’s easy to see why the incident itself resonated with Pound: Ford, a man who repeatedly extols the virtues of brevity and mot juste, finds the most appropriate response to poetry an extralinguistic roll on the ground, perhaps suggesting a dog’s reaction to goose excrement or, less grotesquely, the need to “turn over” a new poetic leaf. It further leaves the (perhaps unjust) impression of Ford, still in 1911 a Victorian gentleman in a high collar, throwing all social niceties to the wind and physically rolling poetry into the new era. The rich language of Pound’s recounting, however, is equally suggestive. Victorian language has “trapped” Pound in goo; he is “fly-papered,” caught out of flight by the viscous sludge of Victorian poetry, “gummed” with its associations not only of stickiness but of being chewed on



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slowly by a wet, toothless mouth, and finally, “strapped down”—as, ironically given Pound’s final days, a patient in a mental institution. From there, the rhetoric gets drier, temporal: Pound is the “jejune” provincial naïf trying to learn “arthritic” language, but here the contrast is between youth and age, and in a context of modernity, youth has the upper hand, since naivete can be corrected while old age cannot. The emphasis and impact, however, remains with the flypaper, especially when considered in light of some of the rhetorical excesses of the Pound-Eliot correspondence, as discussed. Gender and period prejudice runs powerful, in evocative physical terms, throughout the passage. Clearly, although Pound “would rather speak of poetry with Ford Madox Ford than with any man living” and although he knew of Ford’s enthusiasm for Rossetti in precisely those terms of value the two men shared, Pound could not extend this value to “Christina.” Not surprisingly, Virginia Woolf approaches Christina Rossetti from a markedly different standpoint. The quotation with which she titles her essay “I am Christina Rossetti” looks much like a radical claim of identification. And yet the essay begins by an evocation of biography, of the “strangeness, amusement, and oddity of the past sealed within a tank.”34 Woolf structures her essay so that “Christina”—and she, like Pound, uses the familiar name for much of the essay—emerges first as an odd Victorian character; next, as “a little woman dressed in black” who announces her identity (as quoted in the essay’s title) at a teaparty, and only then, finally, as a poet. Woolf distances Rossetti from the modern by sealing her in the “tank” of Victorian biography even as she proclaims her own self-identification with “little woman” at the tea-party. The opening images of the essay, even if cast here in an ironic light, underscore the tension between the Victorian and the modern woman’s image of herself. To say “I am a poet,” words Woolf ventriloquizes for Rossetti, and to say “I am Christina Rossetti” (a Victorian woman) seems to suggest a conundrum with which Woolf is well acquainted. How to put that past, that context, that identity, together with these words? Woolf dwells on this problem of biography: How absolute and unaccommodating these poets are! Poetry, they say, has nothing to do with life. Mummies and wombats, Hallam Street and omnibuses, James Collinson and Charles Cayley, sea mice and Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, Torrington Square and Endsleigh Gardens, even the vagaries of religious belief, are irrelevant, extraneous, superfluous, unreal. It is poetry that matters. The only question of any interest is whether that poetry is good or bad. But this question of poetry, one might point out if only to gain time, is one of the greatest difficulty.35



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Who are these intractable poets of whom she speaks? They seem at once associated with Christina Rossetti and with the more modern school of pure poetics we would more likely associate with Woolf’s own contemporaries. But is Woolf agreeing with them? Or suggesting that Rossetti can best be understood in context, or that she cannot be removed from the context in which she wrote? If she means, as she later speculates, “[b]etter perhaps read for oneself, expose the mind bare to the poem, and transcribe in all its haste and imperfection whatever may be the result of the impact,” then why the relentless first pages of quaint Victorian context? Woolf then goes on to recapitulate many a Victorian truism about not just Rossetti, but women’s poetry generally: “You were an instinctive poet . . . Years and the traffic of the mind with men and books did not affect you in the least . . . Your instinct was so sure, so direct, so intense that it produced poems that sing like music in one’s ear. . . .”36 Woolf’s admiration and identification with Rossetti is sincere; it is itself affecting. But, just as we might expect from an essay by one woman writer that announces its identity as another woman writer (but in quotation marks), this essay betrays a tremendous uncertainty about how to read a Victorian woman’s formalism: it must be instinctive—but it seems it cannot be. Woolf claims that “[t]he judgement of contemporaries is almost always wrong” but goes on to cite nineteenth-century critical readings that resonate powerfully with the values espoused by poetic modernism. One she draws from “Professor Saintsbury”: The meter of the principal poem [“Goblin Market”] may be best described as a dedoggerelized Skeltonic, with the gathered music of the various metrical progress since Spenser, utilized in the place of the wooden rattling of the followers of Chaucer. There may be discerned in it the same inclination towards line irregularity which has broken out, at different times, in the Pindaric of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, and in the rhymelessness of Sayers earlier and of Mr. Arnold later.

The other from (a later) Sir Walter Raleigh: “I think she is the best poet alive . . . The worst of it is you cannot lecture on really pure poetry. . . .”37 On the one hand, we have the valorization of metrical collage—what we might, with Gilbert and Gubar, call “the twin strategies of excavation and innovation”; on the other, an invocation of “pure poetry.” Yet Woolf eschews both of these “Victorian” assessments that nonetheless seem much in keeping with modernist poetic values for her own epithet “instinctive,” a ubiquitous Victorian critical



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. . . you were not a pure saint by any means. You pulled legs; you tweaked noses. You were at war with all humbug and pretence. Modest as you were, still you were drastic, sure of your gift, convinced of your vision. A firm hand pruned your lines; a sharp ear tested their music.

Pointed, disruptive play is not the province of birdsong; nor is editing, although the strangely disembodied “firm hand” that “prunes” is nonetheless at some distance from the natural outgrowth of the song. And finally, Woolf’s rhetoric (quietly) distances Rossetti’s poetic output from yet another set of clichés that cluster around women’s poetry: “Nothing soft, otiose, irrelevant cumbered your pages.” Poetry that was not “soft”—and this was the same discovery that caused Pound some little distress—and yet, was by a woman. “In a word,” as Woolf writes, accepting the equation of “soft” and “irrelevant” and, implicitly, of “hardness” and “art,” “you were an artist.” The next lines of the essay find Woolf herself struggling to put this conundrum together: And thus was kept open, even when you wrote idly, tinkling bells for your own diversion, a pathway for the descent of that fiery visitant who came now and then and fused your lines into that indissoluble connexion which no hand can put asunder . . . Indeed so strange is the constitution of things, and so great the miracle of poetry, that some of the poems you wrote in your little back room will be found adhering in perfect symmetry when the Albert Memorial is dust and tinsel.38

It seems that the “idly tinkling bells” of women’s writing can be visited by the (genderless?) muse of poetry that can “fuse” lines into “indissoluble” (not liquid, not wet) poetry, and that through this miracle, even we moderns can understand a Victorian woman poet who wrote lines that will “adhere” beyond the life of the most monumental of Victorian shrines. Woolf ends her essay with a speculation that, had she been present for Rossetti’s declaration, “should certainly have committed some indiscretion . . . in the awkward ardour of my admiration.” Woolf is aware of and confronts her own awkwardness as a modern writer identifying with a Victorian poetess—she offers her own essay as awkward, and if she has not worked out all the terms of that awkwardness,



truism about women’s poetry. Ultimately, however, Woolf abandons this rhetoric too, or rather moderates it—and all this in the second person, addressed to the Christina Rossetti the essay identifies itself as somehow being:

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we can nonetheless applaud her for offering it to posterity. The extent of this awkwardness, however, should not be forgotten—for who more than Woolf would be likely to embrace Rossetti as a sister, and not a maiden aunt? Yet ultimately, she can not even give “Christina” complete credit for her own poems: for how could “a little woman in black” “tinkling” “a bell” for “diversion” have written poems of “perfect symmetry”? Pound’s and Woolf’s reactions to Rossetti offer a poignant reminder of the very great extent to which reading, like writing, takes place within a strongly gendered framework—and how difficult it may be to escape this framework, even with the best intentions. The questions Pound raises but does not pose—what makes Rossetti modern, and what has prevented readers from seeing her as such?—are key to a renewed debate about reevaluating modernist poetics with relation to women writers. In reading these essays, we see how this same gendered framework has both denied and demonstrated Rossetti’s importance in the development and reception of a modern poetics. As my previous discussions of the reception of Victorian women poets have illustrated, furthermore, this gendered framework is part of the Victorian inheritance of modernism. Christina Rossetti’s poetics were also part of this inheritance. Ford resoundingly proclaims Rossetti as the finest poet of the nineteenth century, as a source of his own poetic values, and, repeatedly, as “modern” in a way that distinguishes her from her closest contemporaries: “It always appears to me that, whereas D. G. Rossetti belongs to a comparatively early period of nineteenth-century literature, Christina’s was a much more modern figure.”39 He insists on Rossetti’s modernity, often with a capital letter, speaking of “the gulf that separated Christina Rossetti as a Modernist from Ruskin and the old Pre-Raphaelite Circle”;40 and that “Christina Rossetti’s nature was mediaeval in the sense that it cared for little things and for arbitrary arrangements. In the same sense it was so very modern.” Ford acknowledges that he is “perhaps eccentric,” but he writes that he believes “Christina Rossetti to be the greatest master of words—at least of English words—that the nineteenth century gave us.” He focuses on her precision and clarity of language, habitually associating her work with French nineteenth-century modernist prose: “Her verse at its best is as clean in texture and as perfect in the choice of epithet as any of Maupassant’s short stories”; he imagines her “seeking almost as remorselessly as did Flaubert himself, and just as solitarily, for correct expression—for that, that is to say, which was her duty in life.” Ford goes to great lengths to explain wherein he finds Christina Rossetti’s modernity, often articulated at the expense of her brother,



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as above. He understands the “gulf” between the siblings primarily as a difference in their relationship to linguistic precision: “exaggerations really pained” Christina Rossetti, whereas he felt that the last thing “the last of the Romantics” wanted was “precision.” Given the near obsessive precision that characterizes Pre-Raphaelite visual art, this estimation hardly seems fair, but Ford felt D. G. Rossetti and his “brethren” lost track of their early objective realism for “big ideas” like morality and blames Ruskin for it: “Pre-Raphaelism in itself was born of Realism. Ruskin gave it one white wing of moral purpose” and unfortunately gave them the “added canon” that “[y]ou must, in fact, paint life as you see it, and yet in such a way as to prove that life is an ennobling thing. How one was to do this one got no particular directions.” Ford values Christina’s more direct, presentational, materialist mode, and makes her reticence a poetic virtue: Her brothers and their distinguished companions troubled mostly about abstract ideas, they made movements, and such large things. In abstract matters she was not singularly intellectual: indeed, we may say that she was not intellectual at all. She had strong and settled faiths that simply could not be talked about, and she had above all a gift that was priceless: a faculty for picking up, like a tiny and dainty mouse, little crumbs of observation that were dropped unnoticed by people who, in argument, assailed each other with tremendous words. Mr Ruskin, for instance, considered that her verse was hardly worth publishing.41

While the strongly gendered and apparently dismissive “tiny and dainty mouse” seems an unlikely description of the poet Ford admires above all others the century produced, the passage makes clear what he values. Her powers of observation, her interest and attention to the small, the concrete, the observable; her eschewal of abstraction and intellectual fashions—these are the qualities that we are to understand set her apart from the “tremendous words” of assailants like “Mr Ruskin,” one of Ford’s particular distastes in part because of his rejection of Christina Rossetti in favor of her brother. Ford was not interested in a poetry of ideas nor indeed in what I called with reference to Victor Hugo “a poetics of the poet”; he values Rossetti’s unobtrusiveness over the flamboyance of her brothers biological and otherwise: [in] those tremendous contests of young lungs of genius . . . the P.R.B. was still, as is the way with romantic youth, hammering the Universe to its pattern, Christina’s voice simply did not carry. No doubt she learnt lessons. But you may imagine her sitting still, bright-eyed, smiling in



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Although the insistence on biographical detail, gender, and instinctive composition recall the tone and conflicts of the Woolf essay, Ford has plenty to say about Rossetti’s poetics that mitigate his assertion that she is “not intellectual at all” (a comment he nonetheless clearly means as a compliment). In particular, he takes pains to distinguish Rossetti’s “medievalism” and explain how this contributes to, rather than counteracts, his sense of her modernity, locating this modernity in her details, her arrangements, and her materialism—in her poetics, that is, rather than her referents: Christina Rossetti’s nature was mediaeval in the sense that it cared for little things and for arbitrary arrangements. In the same sense it was so very modern. For the life of today is more and more becoming a life of little things. We are losing more and more the sense of a whole, the feeling of a grand design, of the coordination of all Nature in one great architectonic scheme. We have no longer any time to look out for the ultimate design. We have to face such an infinite number of little things that we cannot stay to arrange them in our minds, or to consider them as anything but as accidents, happenings, the mere events of the day. And if in outside things we can perceive no design, but only the fortuitous materialism of a bewildering world, we are thrown more and more in upon ourselves for comprehension of that which is not understandable, and for analysis of things of the spirit. In this way we seem again to be returning to the empiricism of the Middle Ages, and in that way, too, Christina herself, although she resembled the figure of a medieval nun, seems also a figure very modern among all the generalizers who surrounded her, who overwhelmed her, who despised and outshouted her.43

For Ford, Rossetti is a poet of “just, simple” words and “the poet of lines, of stanzas, of phrases, and of cadences that are intimately right.” He sees her trying to fit her mode of poetic representation to meet the particular needs of modernity—the particular need, that is, for the particular. He is intrigued, however, by the “challenge” he finds her collected works present by grouping her longer poems together. Thus arranged, he finds that “there stands out a buoyancy of temperament, a profuseness, a life, and, as far as the meter of the verse is concerned, an infectious gaiety. There appears, too, more strongly defined, her little humor, her delicate playfulness, her major key.” Clearly, Ford has an acutely developed sense of Rossetti’s poetic and spiritual conflicts—of the tensions that keep her poetics suspended between



the least, observing very much, and quite content to write one of her little poems the next morning on the corner of her washstand.42


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the ascetic and the aesthetic, between denial and desire. Writing of the closing lines of “The Lowest Room,” he remarks that “if at the end it strikes a note of resignation, and utters the words: these things are not for me, it certainly shows that the poet enjoyed describing the combats while they lasted.” Ford finds, rightly, I think, that Rossetti locates her life of the senses firmly in her poetic play: “her faculty for pure delight and for aesthetic enjoyment was expressed all the more strongly in her meter.” He is intriguing, as well, on genre: “It is convenient to call her verse lyric, but the term is not strictly correct, as I shall attempt to explain later. It is assuredly not Epic, it is never exactly Elegiac, nor is it ever really Narrative verse. Most particularly it is not philosophic, hortatory, or improving,”44 a formulation that almost recalls the early evocation of the writing-book from Maude. Ford’s poetic and personal connection to Rossetti runs deep, and Ford recognizes and rails against the gender prejudice that he feels has hampered her reception. Ruskin earns as intense scorn from Ford as from any later feminist critic for his dismissal of Rossetti. He speculates that it was because “she proved herself a poet more modern than her brother” that she earned Ruskin’s dislike: “It was perhaps for this reason that Mr. Ruskin—and in this alone he would have earned for himself my lasting dislike—that Mr Ruskin pooh-poohed and discouraged Christina Rossetti’s efforts at poetry.” Ford recounts that Ruskin feared “It was not good for Gabriel’s fame or market . . . that there should be another Rossetti in the field. And I must confess that when I consider these utterances and this attitude I am filled with as hot and as uncontrollable an anger as I am when faced by some more than usually imbecile argument against the cause of women’s franchise.”45 Intriguingly, these reflections, this “hot” and “uncontrollable” feminist anger about poetic sexism, launch an equally heated tirade against an “imbecile” police magistrate who argues that women have “never reigned”; when Ford raised the counterexamples of Victoria and Elizabeth, his “superior interlocutor remarked that Victoria was a horrid old woman, and Elizabeth should have been a man.”46 Ford’s tirade, then, immediately associates the impulse to exclude women from politics with the impulse to exclude them from poetics—an association which, coming at the pen of a critic who hardly celebrated the connection between politics and the arts, reinforces the sense of the integration of poetics and politics that also characterized the writings on meter discussed in chapter 5. Nonetheless, by virtue of this association, Ford sees the exclusion of Rossetti as simple sexism divorced from poetic concerns (he never considers that Ruskin might have had grounds for his dismissal), and he raises Rossetti’s counterexample in



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Christina Rossetti’s was a figure so tragic, so sympathetic and, let me emphasize it, so modern, that I could wish for any one who put obstacles in her way—and there were several—that fate was adjudged the most terrible of all, that a millstone should be set about his neck and that he should be cast into a deep sea.

And then, in a move even more damning, he suggests that he is unduly hard upon Mr. Ruskin, little though his eloquent ghost may mind it. For the fact is that Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites whom he heralded so splendidly and so picturesquely survived—that these men marked the close of an era. Ruskin was engaged in setting the seal on a pot. Christina Rossetti was, if not a genie in the form of a cloud of smoke, at least a subtle essence that was bound not only to escape his embalming, but to survive him.47

That Ford predicts the poet of so many corpse poems may escape Ruskin’s “embalming” shows that he not only appreciated Rossetti’s dry if rather gallows humor but was quite capable of joining in. As the reactions of Pound, Woolf, Brooks, Warren, and even Gilbert and Gubar illustrate, however, it has taken some time for Ford’s predictions to be borne out.



poetry to the same level as Victoria. Ford goes on to suggest that Victoria and Elizabeth could “look after themselves” but that

. . . the Queen turned again, and this time she said “Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing . . .” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

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n chess, “en passant” (for which there is no word in English) refers to the move in which a pawn—lowly and, in the Victorian imagination, female—captures “in passing.” A white pawn, say, can make this somewhat stealthy and unusual move when an opposing black pawn advances two squares on its first move, coming to share a row with the white pawn. Had black moved only the single square usually allowed it, the white pawn could have captured. That this situation arises at all, of course, means that the white pawn, perhaps unnoticed or forgotten, has already advanced beyond her own territory. Sometimes it happens that a novice player will overlook this power of the unobtrusive pawn in his exuberant desire to jump ahead. En passant is a relatively late addition to chess meant to ensure that a threat could not be avoided by a sudden flashy move. In this circumstance, the white pawn may, while remaining within her historically circumscribed range of movement, momentarily bypass the usual constraint and capture without direct contact. She may still, in the future, advance to become the most powerful and aggressive piece. “Une femme passa.” “And this I know, I did but pass.” “Curiouser and curiouser.” The most curious experience of writing this book has been the consistency with which it has generated its own range of shock reaction—from the full-on Baudelairean jolt to the more Wordsworthian “gentle shock of mild surprise.” I’ve already discussed—most extensively in my introduction, third, and sixth chapters—the prejudices and divisions that explain why this might be the case. Of these, I have found gender as the most immovable, more tenacious than those of nation, period, or genre. I am convinced that had my project been on Baudelaire and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Baudelaire and Hopkins (an equally devout and even later



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poet), or even Baudelaire and Dickens (despite the generic divide), the surprise it generated would have been far less. In light of this surprise, I would like to conclude by way of Rossetti’s more immediate audience of poets—specifically, of male Victorian poets who were, if grudgingly, valued and recognized as formal innovators by the modern poets who “remembered and forgot” Rossetti’s work. Of these, there was one in particular for whom Baudelaire and Rossetti were enthusiasms that seemed naturally and equally to coexist. Algernon Charles Swinburne did much to introduce the world of British letters to Baudelaire’s work; his 1862 review of Fleurs du mal established one version of Baudelaire, at least, although arguably the hothouse version that theorists such as Jameson would later reject. Swinburne also launched his influential monograph on William Blake with an epigraph from Baudelaire and wrote the long and impassioned elegy “Ave Atque Vale” in response to an erroneous report of Baudelaire’s death. Indeed, the reception of Swinburne’s own work became bound up with the image of Baudelaire that he had helped to create—likely to the detriment of each. On the strength of these well-known texts, then, as well as on the basis of their shared thematics of lesbianism and death, their shared interest in classical and experimental forms, and their shared experience of having their work rejected as obscene by their respective cultures, no one would question Baudelaire’s importance for Swinburne (with the exception, possibly, of the older, more retiring, and infinitely more sober Swinburne himself). As for Christina Rossetti, Swinburne knew her and was intimate with both of her brothers, although the sister seems to have kept her personal distance from her siblings’ outlandish friend. The following acts, however, attest to his devotion to her poetry. In addition to the oft-repeated account that he screamed in ecstasy over passages in her books, he sent her four volumes of his own work; he dedicated his 1893 “Century of Rondels” to her with a poem in the form; just before her death, he published a “Ballad of Appeal to Christina Rossetti” begging her for more poetry, and just after it he wrote her an elegy. In a footnote in his essay on Matthew Arnold, furthermore, he describes her “Passing Away, Saith the World, Passing Away” as “so much the noblest of sacred poems in our language that there is none that comes near it enough to stand second”; he claims that it is “touched with the fire and bathed in the light of sunbeams,” and likens it to “large echoes of the serene and sonorous tides of heaven.”1 Rossetti had no such panegyrics for Swinburne, and the account of her covering over with paper every atheist passage in his poetry is



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legendary. Nonetheless, her brother William Michael did dedicate her posthumous New Poems (1896) to Swinburne, and it is extremely unlikely he would have done so had she not returned Swinburne’s regard and acknowledged her position as model and influence. These instances, furthermore, date from late in her career, at a time when the differences between their poetics and thematics would have been nearly as marked as their difference in religious devotion; my focus, however, has been firmly on her earlier work and almost exclusively on the secular verse from Goblin Market and Other Poems. In light of these texts, we might equally find that for these two poets also, “their shared thematics of lesbianism and death and their shared interest in both classical [or, for Rossetti, at least traditional] and experimental forms” provide evidence of a strong connection. Nonetheless, Rossetti’s influence on Swinburne is another one of those facts that had been widely acknowledged but fell from critical consciousness—even as T. S. Eliot would claim that Swinburne was one of the critics most to be trusted on poetry, and as Woolf, in claiming and not claiming to be Christina Rossetti, would quote Swinburne’s footnote. Furthermore, even in Swinburne’s enthusiasm, Rossetti is often isolated among women poets, ranked with Sappho but not Milton. A poignant instance of this dynamic intervening in a poet’s enthusiasm can be found in the correspondence of another youthful disciple of Rossetti—one whose poetic experiments were so striking that their author was “rescued” from the Victorian period and claimed by twentieth-century modernists as one of their own.2 In an 1872 letter to his mother, Gerard Manley Hopkins begins by asking to be remembered to Christina Rossetti’s older sister Maria, remarking on her recent publication, and noting that Christina had also recently published “some stories in prose.” The remarks that follow betray a strange internal conflict about gender and poetry: But [Christina Rossetti] has been, I am afraid, thrown rather into the shade by her brother. I have not read his book. From the little I have seen and gathered of it I daresay he has more range, force, and interest, and then there is the difference between the man and a woman, but for pathos and pure beauty of art I do not think he is her equal: in fact the simple beauty of her work cannot be matched.3

The letter clearly shows that Christina Rossetti remained high in Hopkin’s estimation beyond his Oxford days, when he wrote a long poem “A Voice From the World” explicitly in response to Rossetti’s “The Convent Threshold.” Other early poems such as



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“Heaven-Haven” and “Spring and Death” powerfully echo Rossetti’s own “Spring” poems thematically, structurally, and even vocalically. In the context of this later letter, Hopkins’ estimation of the male Rossetti’s work sounds cursory (“I daresay”), whereas the praise for Rossetti’s is obviously heartfelt. Yet Hopkins feels he must find Dante Gabriel’s poems superior in certain “masculine” characteristics—even though he has not read them, and “the difference between a man and a woman” seems to suggest an essential difference in poetry and value so apparent, so widely acknowledged (“of course”), that it need not be explained. Simultaneously, however, he must pay homage to the poetry, to the “art” and “beauty,” that had so affected him. Hopkins witnesses with regret a woman poet eclipsed by a lesser male one, while at the same time illustrating how tenacious conceptions of gender difference color his opinion—even against his taste, experience, and better judgment. Reception history long showed his fears to be well-founded, and more: while the New Critics ignored Rossetti and used Victorian women poets to exemplify bad poetry, as discussed, Hopkins’ own “Spring and Fall” was one of I. A. Richards’ examples in the hugely influential Practical Criticism. It is now a commonplace to acknowledge Hopkins’ debt to Rossetti—indeed, Judith Nixon has argued convincingly for the specifically Rossettean origins of “Spring and Fall.’ ”4 It remains surprising only that Hopkins’ penchant for language play, for puns and nonce compounds, his metrical experiments and interest in archaic forms—let alone his complex anxieties about sexuality, sensuality, poetry, and religion—did not suggest the Rossetti connection more forcefully somewhat sooner. On the basis of such patterns of influence, I could continue to draw up a chain of more or less speculative, more or less powerful and convincing “begats”—Mallarmé, for example, went to London as a young man in hopes of meeting Swinburne, whose work he greatly admired. This fact, in turn, considered in conjunction with Swinburne’s intense admiration for Rossetti, might help render the affinities I have found between Rossettean and Mallarméan abstraction and negation a little less of a conceptual leap. I am not, however, primarily interested in playing “six degrees of Christina Rossetti” with nineteenth- or twentieth-century poets when Baudelaire has been the acknowledged double and brother of almost every poet in his wake. Patterns of reception—or the lack thereof—have clearly engaged my interest for the prejudices they reveal or give the lie to. For the most part, however, I have pursued a different logic. I have been most taken with those aspects of Rossetti’s and Baudelaire’s oeuvre that seem, despite profound differences in poetics, gender, and



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national context, to “correspond,” to borrow a favorite word from the Baudelairean lexicon—and to correspond without direct knowledge or contact. This kind of “correspondence” attests to the reality of a “cross-Channel” zone, as Margaret Cohen has said of the novel, of shared poetic influence and concern that transcends individual contacts. The juxtaposition has also, however, foregrounded elements in each poet and respective poetic culture that ingrained patterns of reading and inherited prejudices had rendered less visible. I have been struck by what I continue to see as analogous relationships to questions of register, lexicon, and form, analogous manipulation of these poetic elements to explore issues of class and gender in specifically poetic ways. I have been struck by the way both poets seem at once attuned and resistant to dominant trends in essentializing and nationalizing poetics. On the most local, linguistic level, the level at which translinguistic comparison might be supposed to be the most difficult, I have been consistently arrested by the way each poet uses language play to critique, destabilize, and at times thoroughly undermine set assumptions about national and social as well as poetic identity. Both poets engage popular forms but remain attracted to the potential of pure poetry, and both are deeply invested in poetry even as they seem, at times, intent on tearing down its temple. Despite their transgressive relationship to poetic and social norms, however, I would argue that while both poets explore and exploit social, national, and political codes and effects, they do so primarily to pursue poetic ends, rather than using poiesis as a means to address these other concerns. This emphasis, however, nonetheless retains and in fact deepens the very connection between the world and poem these poets also sometimes dream of severing. The opposition between “stealth” and “shock” by which I first defined their transgressive attitudes and strategies indeed broadly describes a difference between the poets and their poetry, but sustained comparison has illuminated the ways in which each can employ, in central and important ways, the mode I’ve associated with the other. Mode is the key word here: I have been concerned more with such relationships and attitudes—the skew of each poet, so to speak, toward material, signification, identity, form—than I have been concerned with any thematic parallels, although I might have written a book about dead women, tortured religiosity or even a certain masochism (more or less measured) devoted to the same authors. The juxtaposition, in other words, might have sustained several other quite distinct studies. Neither figures in Diana Fuss’ analysis of the “Corpse Poem,” but each seems to pose a follow-up question to



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Fuss’ conclusion that “the broken physicality of verse aligns poetry, more than any other literary genre, with corporeal disintegration,” and this follow-up question would ask how habitual presence of the pun would affect this alignment. For “stealth” and “shock” meet and seem nearly to coincide in the way each poet has bound pun, poem, and corpse into a kind of performative and conceptual unity—to different ends. The union is curious and persuasive, again, of a crosscultural zone of poetic commonality even in the face of marked difference. I would like the last word, however, to go to another surprise denizen of that zone. I would like to give a nod to the book’s real “stealth” hero, that poet whose ubiquitous participation I did not actually mean to recruit but who would not be left out—that unlikely and unsung harbinger of the poetic modern, Thomas Hood.



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I NTRODUCTION 1. Ivan Kreilkamp, “Victorian Poetry’s Modernity,” Victorian Poetry 41.4 (2003), 603. See also, for example, Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1993) 3; Carol Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984); Jessica Feldman, Victorian Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002); Jerome McGann, “Medieval versus Victorian versus Modern: Rossetti’s Art of Images,” Modernism/Modernity 2.1 (1995), 97–112; and, most recently and to the point, Rachel Teukolsky, “Modernist Ruskin, Victorian Baudelaire,” PMLA 122.3 (2007), 711–727. 2. Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmond Jephcott, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 19. The Benjaminian-Baudelairean account of the flâneur remains the most influential, but the collection The Flaneur, ed. Keith Tester, offers alternatve genealogies and developments (New York: Routledge, 1994). 3. Benjamin 4, 28. 4. Ibid., 28–29. 5. Eliot wrote three essays on Baudelaire: “The Lesson of Baudelaire” (1922); “Baudelaire in our time” (1927), and “Baudelaire” (1930). For Jameson, see “Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The Dissolution of the Referent and the Artificial ‘Sublime,’ ” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), 247–263. 6. Benjamin 4, 320. 7. For a discussion of Swineburne and Rossetti, see Coda, 216–217. 8. Paul de Man discusses the complexities of Baudelaire’s formulations of “memory” and “representation” of the present in “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1983), 157–158. 9. Sharon Marcus, “Same Difference? Transnationalism, Comparative Literature, and Victorian Studies,” Victorian Studies 45.4 (2003), 679. 10. The collection The Literary Channel: The Trans-National Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, defines a trans-Channel “zone” of novelistic activity and broadly documents



NOT E S

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

NOTES venues of cross-cultural exchange and mutual development—with particular relation, naturally, to the novel. Its frame of reference is also largely restricted, however, to the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, thus avoiding, for the most part, the pitfalls of “Comparative Victorian” discourse. As cited by Kreilkamp, 604. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 1: The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), 156. Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989), 121–122. Several subsequent studies have presented a more nuanced view and critiqued predecessors for “cherry-picking” salaciously misogynist passages and downplaying male modernist support for women poets such as Mina Loy and Marianne Moore. Jewel Spears Brooker, for example, takes issue with Gilbert and Gubar’s reduction of Eliot to a series of binaries, quoting only his most sexist passages and reducing the nuances of an essay like “Tradition and the Individual Talent” to an embrace of orthodoxy when in fact it argues that “novelty is better than repetition.” I think anyone would acknowledge, however, that even cherry-pickers would have quite the orchard of misogynist remarks to choose from. Making Feminist History: The Literary Scholarship of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: Garland Publications, 1994), 244. In chapter 6, I discuss in detail both important contemporaries and modernist precursors that did recognize these qualities in Rossetti’s work, as well as the discomfort with which modernist critics at once did and did not. “Goblin Market: Ribald Classic,” illustrated by Kumiko Craft, Playboy 20.9 (1973), 115–119. For a meticulously detailed account of the illustrated publishing history of the poem, see Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (Athens: Ohio UP, 2003). Pound repudiated Baudelaire but took permission from him nonetheless. The French Decadent writer Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery Valette) was dubbed “Mademoiselle Baudelaire” by her critic (and lover) Maurice Barrès. Kathy Acker cites Baudelaire as an influence in Pussy, King of the Pirates, the cover of which proclaims its author “America’s most beloved transgressive novelist,” per Spin magazine (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 177. Michael Field (pseudonym of the lesbian couple and aunt-niece writing team Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) wrote a sonnet “From Baudelaire.” Michael Field also wrote a sonnet “For Christina Rossetti,” in which they clearly see her as a kindred spirit, by which I mean closet lesbian: “Ah! had this secret touched thee, in a tomb/Thou hadst not buried thy enchanting self.”



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19. The Bakhtinian tradition, for example, advances a theory of transgression under the rubric of the carnivalesque, as pursued explicitly in Peter Stallybrass’ and Allon White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986). This early work of cultural studies tends to see traditional literary forms that engage transgressive or grotesque material as motivated primarily by a (conflicted) desire to police the boundaries of classical purity (see, for example, the discussion of Pope’s Dunciad, 109–112); Baudelaire’s flâneur is mentioned only in passing to emphasize his separation from the crowd he seeks, while Baudelaire’s hatred of George Sand clearly helps exclude him from the transgressive poetics the authors pursue via Bakhtin (135–156). 20. Roland Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye,” in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1972). 21. Susan Robin Sulieman, “Pornography, Transgression, and the Avant Garde: Bataille’s Story of the Eye,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 119. 22. Stallybrass, 201. 23. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, Editions de la Pléiade, 1975), 1: 285. 24. OC 1, 285. 25. See, for example, “Le Cygne” (“La forme d’une ville/ Change plus vite, hélas! que le Coeur d’un mortel”) and (“Veuve d’Hector, Hélas! et femme d’Hélénus!”). See also “Au Lecteur”; “Le Masque”; “Les Petites Vieilles”; “Le Vampire”; “Le Gouffre”; and many others. 26. OC 1, 285. 27. Poe’s tale begins “in the consideration of the faculties and impulses— or the prima mobilia [first causes] of the human soul”; discussions of phrenology, theology, and metaphysics, to demonic possession, a self-reflexive text that shifts from academic dryness to a narrative of unmotivated murder (“The idea struck my fancy”) and then, unmotivated confession—complete with more than one “alas!” See “The Imp of the Perverse,” in The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Suzanne Clee (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1983), 1056–1061. 28. Maude, 24–25. 29. For my discussion of “La Chambre double,” see chapter 1; for “La Soupe et les nuages,” see chapter 2. 30. I discuss this “compound” at greater length in chapter 5.

1

A N Y W HERE O UT OF THIS V ERSE : B AUDEL A IRE ’S P ROSE P OETICS A ND THE A ESTHETICS OF TR A NSGRESSION

1. A version of this chapter appears in Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30: 1 (Spring–Summer, 2001). 2. OC 1, 356.



NOTES

NOTES

3. While there is agreement on the basic components of the collection’s structure, opinions vary greatly as to particulars, as well as about the degree of organization and complexity to which the collection adheres. James Lawler has argued strongly for the existence of an elaborate and highly structured dialectical “secret architecture” (Barbey d’Aurevilly’s much quoted phrase), countering prominent scholars (Claude Pichois, Leo Bersani) who have dismissed such a notion for different reasons, and goes beyond earlier approaches that see the work as loosely, but not meticulously, structured (among them Georges Blin, D. J. Mossop, and Marcel Ruff). Lawler also provides a general overview of these views, Poetry and Moral Dialectic: Baudelaire’s Secret Architecture (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997), 14–16. 4. Her study Défigurations du langage poétique ilg seconde revolution baudelairienne centers around this position (Paris: Flammarion, 1975). 5. Hiddleston, 3. Edward Kaplan’s study presents a different view, arguing for the internal coherence of the whole collection as a conceived if not fully realized book that, much like Les Fleurs du mal, is “energized by conflicts between his esthetic and ethical drives,” Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in The Parision Prowler (Athens: Parisian U of Georgia P, 1990), xiii. Nicolae Babuts’ view also takes issue with the notion of unresolvable fragmentation, arguing rather that such fragmentation or “dissipation” is actually an opposite but necessary function of the “centralization” of the unified self that he sees as the primary focus of Baudelaire’s oeuvre: “dissipation can only be conceived as a function of centralization, . . . a function of the existence of the self that can accomplish both, “Baudelaire: At the Limits and Beyond (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1997), 35. 6. Hiddleston argues that Baudelaire’s preoccupation with the relationship of poetry to prose dates from early in his career, citing as evidence the markedly prosy interventions in some of the verses (“Les Aveugles” and “Le Flacon”) as well as Du vin et du haschich and La Fanfarlo, whose hero Samuel Cramer finds prose translations of his youthful Romantic verse more effective than his more mature verse poetry in his attempts to win the affections of the literarily savvy Mme. de Cosmelly, Baudelaire and Le Spleen de Paris (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 62–65. 7. Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems : The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 1. The first chapter of this work applies Genette’s notion of the “seuil” or threshold to the complexities of the prose poem collection’s various titles (2–5) and the dedication letter to Arsène Houssaye, which I discuss at greater length in the following chapter. 8. Tzvetan Todorov, “Poetry without Verse,” trans. Catherine Porter, American Poetry Review 34.6 (November–December, 2005), 9–13. 9. D. J. Mossop, Pure Poetry: Studies in French Poetic Theory and Practice 1746–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 72.



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10. Walter Benjamin, for example, found the critical works theoretically both at odds with and inferior to the verse, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Benjamin 4, 50. Although it is common practice to cite from the critical writings with reference to the verse or prose poetry, there has been less interest in an overall relationship between Baudelaire’s critical and poetic output. Rosemary Lloyd’s Baudelaire’s Literary Criticism was long a rare exception and focuses sustained attention on the relationship between the criticism and poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981). Two recent studies of the prose poem have focused particular attention on the relationship between Baudelaire’s theory of comedy and his prose poem collection, which likewise turns on the double. See Stephens, “The Prose Poem and the Dualities of Comic Art,” in Baudelaire’s Prose Poems (108–159); and Debarati Sanyal, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006), 39–52. 11. OC 2, 626–627. 12. OC 2, 578. 13. Romanticism has a different face in France than a reader familiar with its English and German counterparts might expect—in poetry, it essentially has the face of Victor Hugo, a classification that French critics routinely make and other traditions have trouble with. Two factors explain the difference: even before Romantic innovations, English and German prosody were not under restrictions comparable to the strict and explicit French neoclassical rules. Considered in context, Hugo’s innovations are arguably more radical than the changes in tone and diction advocated in, for example, Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The more dramatic politics of France around the turn of the century, as well as a more intimate connection between the state and the arts, also contributed to what is arguably a more overtly politicizing tone. 14. Victor Hugo, Les Orientales (Paris: Flammarion), 413. 15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 174–177. 16. OC 2, 578. 17. From Boileau’s L’Art Poétique as cited by Gordon Pocock in Boileau and the Nature of Neo-Classicism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980), 91. Boileau advocated a rational approach to poetic composition, a position also argued with great insistence, though on different grounds, by Poe in “The Poetic Principle.” 18. OC 2, 578. 19. OC 2, 578–579. 20. OC 2, 576. 21. Ibid. 22. Delacroix’s paintings Les Femmes d’Alger and La Mort de Sardanapale, among others, which depict “oriental” women as the erotic



NOTES

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

NOTES objects of a male gaze. Les Femmes d’Alger may be read as a study in voyeurism, since the women depicted seem to be in a harem, a space forbidden to men. They are, however, fully clothed. Sardanapale depicts the imminent murder of any number of writhing naked women. Delacroix was, of course, a great favorite with Baudelaire. OC 2, 576. Wing, The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarmé (New York: Cambridge UP, 1986), 20. OC 2, 376. Eighteen poems appeared under this title in La Revue des Deux Mondes. Benjamin 4, 50. Johnson, 12. As quoted by Johnson, 9. See note 5. OC 2, 329–330. This orientation prefigures the Jakobsonian paradigm that opposes poetic discourse (metaphoric axis) to prose (metonymic axis), around which Johnson structures her argument about the rhetorical relations between the prose and verse texts. OC 2, 330. See Hiddleston for a more extensive discussion of such characteristic features (68–75). Hiddleston, 72–73. OC 1, 21. Marcel Ruff sees “Hymne à la Beauté” along with “Le Masque” as completing the series “La Beauté,” “L’Idéal,” and “La Géante” in L’Esprit du mal et l’esthétique baudelairienne (Paris: Librairie Arman Colin, 1955), 335. OC I, 24–25. Ruff offers a considerably different interpretation of “qu’importe,” reading it to indicate not “l’indifférence devant le choix du ciel ou de l’enfer,” but rather, following an interpretation of “si” in the sense of “puisque,” to emphasize the transcendent potential Beauty holds out: “peu importe que la Beauté vienne de l’enfer, si elle ouvre le ciel” (335). This poem’s “beauty,” indeed, has much in common with the aesthetic position discussed in “Peintre de la vie moderne.” Baudelaire and the Poetics of Craft (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 134–135. OC 2, 280. Hiddleston, 66. Hiddleston comments on a similar effect in the prose transposition of “Le Vin des chiffonniers” that appears in “Du Vin et du haschisch,” noting that certain additions in the prose seem to function solely to interrupt the flow of the alexandrine, as in the line “Tu me glorifieras et tu seras content” (verse) to “tu me glorifieras



226

44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

227

fièrement et tu seras vraiment content,” where “the adverbs, . . . technically intensifiers, have, as in conventional speech, the opposite effect of weakening or banalizing the statement.” “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe,” OC 2, 329. I discuss this connection at greater length in chapter 3. OC 2, 290. The lines also echo lines from the Préface to the prose poems, “Quel est celui de nous qui n’a pas, dans ses jours d’ambition, rêvé le miracle d’une prose poétique . . . ?” One thinks of the “Crépuscule” poems, of the end of “Spleen II,” and of the opening imagery “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe.” In criticism that relies on the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, simile is generally understood to be metaphor’s close relative. In his discussion of the role of simile in Baudelaire’s poetry, however, Clive Scott insists on a radical difference between the two. He classifies metaphor as direct, urgent, and permanent while simile is “discursive,” “leisured,” and “temporary.” He argues that simile indicates the poet’s assumption of a positive and powerful role, “the determined inhabitation of the creative process,” but also links it with allegory as indicative of the failure of language, “a fall from the grace of metaphor.” Viewed in this light, the use of simile parallels the use of metonymy in the prose poems with effects similar to those discussed by Johnson in Défigurations. Scott goes on, however, to give a lengthy analysis of the simile as formal (syllabic) device in Baudelaire’s poetry, offering a less meta-theoretical rationale for its prominence in Les Fleurs du mal, see A Question of Syllables (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 61–64; 71–85. 1857 had “Qu’on dirait que j’emprunte,” echoed here in “on les dirait,” which in the prose poem has a particularly prosy sound given the surrounding poetic context—perhaps Baudelaire had noticed the same effect, leading him to expunge the phrase from the verse but retain it for the prose. 1857 had eyes like mirrors “qui font les étoiles plus belles,” changed to “qui font toutes choses” in 1861. OC 1, 872. Y.-G. Le Dantec reads “je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes” as the equivalent of “Je ne hais que ce mouvement qui déplace les lignes”—in other words, he likes the rocking, watery movements suggested in this portion of the poem, “les mouvements du serpent ou du navire” (as cited in OC 1, 872). OC 1, 281–82. In the 1859 Salon, Baudelaire evokes a painting from the 1844 Salon Appartement à louer by F. A. Biard and wonders “si la Venise de Véronèse et de Bassan a été affligée par ces logogriphes,” whether Michelangelo had to suffer “semblables monstruosités” and, ultimately, if Biard is “éternel et omniprésent, comme Dieu,” ultimately deciding that “ces horreurs” are “une grace spéciale attribué à la race française.” This repeated juxtaposition of classical beauty and ephemeral and (here disparaged) lowly, temporally specific,



NOTES

53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

NOTES realism—specifically associated with the representation of a room— further emphasizes the complex interaction of the critical writings and the prose poems. The 1859 essay, which in several instances presents more conservative revisions or even contradictions of the 1855 “Exposition,” redraws the stark dividing line between classical eternal mode and realist temporal mode, here regretting the same violation of the former by the latter that provides the dramatic crux of “La Chambre double” (OC 2, 615). Marie Maclean provides an extensive theoretical consideration of the prose poems as “allegories of reception” in her Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment (New York: Routledge, 1988), 161–175. Graham Chesters offers a more detailed reading of various lapses in this poem, particularly focusing on the way the poem sets up expectations of certain tropes or rhetorical structures—“the analogy between Beauty and wine”; the binary established by the opposition of infernal and divine—which it then either abandons or undercuts by overtly strained rhymes, empty filler, and so on (134–135). OC 2, 319. OC 2, 319. Susan Blood’s critique of a debate between de Man and Hans Robert Jauss “about” the relative importance of “aesthetics” versus “poetics” in Baudelaire’s poetry is pertinent here. De Man’s critique of Jauss rests, as Blood argues, on Jauss’ reader-response position that views the text in relation to the phenomenal world, to the sensory or perceptual experience of the reader, rather than retaining the focus on grammar and the “dependence on the letter” that de Man associates with allegory and hence with Baudelaire’s poetics (17). With Blood, I see Baudelaire’s poetics as one that “itself slips towards an aesthetics, that is, towards a calculation of reader response which presents the poetic fact as always/already interpreted” (17). Yet while my own emphasis on the prose poems as allegories not only of writing but of reading—as integrated and reciprocal processes—may seem to place me firmly in the Jauss camp, I hope instead to offer a more mediated position. I would contend that de Man’s association of aesthetics with “synthesis” is not appropriate to Baudelaire’s performative, violating, movement- and difference-driven aesthetics, which in fact sunders aesthetic perception from any experience of synthesis, and locates aesthetic experience—within the poetic text—precisely at those moments when linguistic rupture refocuses our attention on language’s material, non-transcendent nature. See Susan Blood, Baudelaire and the Aesthetics of Bad Faith (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997). de Man wrote the introduction to Jauss’ Toward an Aesthetics of Reception. See “Reading and History,” in de Man’s Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1986), 56–72. Jauss’ response appears in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1989), 202–208.



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58. Babuts also comments extensively on the centrality of transgression—physical and psychological—in Baudelaire’s oeuvre, although his focus differs considerably from my own, positing as paramount the existence of a unified self. Seeing the primary movement within the texts as taking place between self and other (or others, particularly the crowd), Babuts links psychological and physical penetration with the acquisition of “new knowledge and experience” and suggests that “the imperative is to remain the active principle that initiates the exchange.” I would counter that at times Baudelaire clearly courts and assumes the passive position, and is not only penetrating but penetrated. 59. I am the wound and the knife!/ I am the blow and the cheek it strikes!/ I am the limbs and the wheel,/ The victim and executioner! (OC 1, 78–79).

2

“P ROSE C OMBAT ”: B AUDEL A IRE

A ND

THE P RESS

1. “Le témoin de ta force et de ta virulence,/Cher poison préparé par les anges! liqueur/Qui me ronge. . . .” “Le Flacon,” 26–28; OC 1, 48. 2. Cf. 20, 39–49. 3. OC 1, 663. The dating of these fragments is very tenuous. Jacques Crépet dates them from the period 1855–1862 based on internal evidence; frequent correspondence with the prose poems, including notes further developed into finished texts and theoretical fragments that clearly refer to the prose poem project, also supports this date range, since the prose poem project itself was conceived and developed at this time. The order of publication, however, does not reliably reflect any order of composition. Cf. OC 1, 1467–1473. 4. Johnson, 160; and Hiddleston. Lloyd gives “Fusé, Maxim and Commonplace in Baudelaire,” Modern Language Review 80.3 (1985), 563–570. 5. Rosemary Lloyd, Baudelaire’s World (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002), 63. 6. OC 1, 705–706. 7. OC 1, 705. 8. Ibid. 9. Graham Robb first led me to the research presented here in his article “Les Origines journalistiques de la prose poétique de Baudelaire,” Les Lettres romains 44 (1990), 15–25. At that time, he could lament the lack of attention paid to the prose poem’s nonliterary origins. Recently, however, a special issue of Recherches et Travaux 65 (2004) was devoted to the complex relations between journalism and poetry in nineteenth-century Paris and Naples. All comment on the similarity, particularly in tone but also in preoccupation and even structure, between Baudelaire’s prose poetry and certain regular journalistic features, including the feuilleton, the chose vue, the fantaisie, and the satire. 10. OC 1, 350.



NOTES

NOTES

11. Again, the dates of composition are elusive, but “La Chambre double” was among the prose poems first published in La Presse in 1862, while “La Soupe et les nuages” was rejected for publication in 1865 by the Revue nationale et étrangère. Cf. OC 1, 1346. 12. OC 1, 350. 13. As cited in “On Poetic Language” in The Word and Verbal Art, trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977), 40. 14. Sanyal, 95. 15. OC 1, 701. 16. OC 1, 705. 17. OC 1, 677. 18. Sanyal, 95. 19. Ibid. 20. Stephens, Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, ed. Rosemary Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 70–71. 21. OC 1, 275. 22. See, for example, Maclean’s chapter, “For men’s ears only: narrative power play and the sexual/textual nexus,” 125–140. 23. Wing, 25. 24. OC 1, 365, 738 (with calculation, likely of payment). 25. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992), 87–88. 26. Silvia Disegni, “Les Poètes journalistes au temps de Baudelaire,” Recherches et Travaux 65, 83–98. 27. Benjamin 4, 13. 28. Benjamin cites from Baudelaire’s introduction to a collection of poetry by his friend Pierre Dupont, 12. 29. Benjamin 4, 13. 30. L’Innovateur: Moniteur de la Cordonnerie Vol 9, No. 3 (July 15, 1858), 1. 31. Graham Robb, ed. Le Corsaire-Satan en Silhouette: Le milieu journalistique de la jeunesse de Baudelaire (Nashville: Vanderbilt University, Publications du Centre W. T. Bandy d’Etudes baudelairiennes, 1985), 40. The passage is drawn from a satirical piece on the Corsaire-Satan that appeared in a rival publication and describes the fate of one young journalist who came to the Corsaire-Satan much exploited and jaded. 32. Disegni also references the Corsaire-Satan’s satiric tone—frequently applied to poetry—as a potential influence in the development of the prose poem at the hands of “poètes-journalistes” such as the young Baudelaire. 33. Le Corsaire-Satan, 9 Juillet 1847. 34. These collaborations, L’Héritière de Birague et Jean Louis, date from 1822. Robb, Corsaire, 16. 35. La Silhouette, May 17, 1846. As cited by Robb, Corsaire, 51. 36. La Silhouette, as cited by Robb, Corsaire, 65.



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37. Robb suggests Murger as a “guide” to Baudelaire’s journalistic milieu. “Origines,” 20. 38. “À Arsène Houssaye,” OC 1, 275. 39. Robb cites a parody of Houssaye’s Sapho, Corsaire 9. 40. Le Coupeur. Journal des tailleurs, Vol. 1, No. 6 (June 15, 1842), 46–47. 41. Footnote in original: Au bureau du Bon Ton et du Coupeur. Même prix que ce dernier; l’Elégant paraît, le Ier de chaque mois et forme avec le Coupeur, le cours le plus complet de coupe et de confection. Coupeur, 47. 42. The general tone also calls to mind M. Arnoux of Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale and his publication L’Art industriel, which also recalls elements of Le Corsaire-Satan: “L’Art industriel, posé au point central de Paris, était un lieu de rendez-vous commode, un terrain neutre où les rivalités se coudoyaient familièrement” (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 83. Arnoux, of course, literalizes his publication’s title by the end of the novel and owns a china factory. 43. “Les Martyres ridicules par Léon Cladel,” OC 2, 183–184. 44. Henri Murger, Scènes de la vie de Bohème (Paris: Éditions R. Simon). 45. Le Coupeur Vol 1 No. 5, May 15, 1842. 46. Le Coupeur, March 15, 1842. 47. Again, I am indebted to Graham Robb for this connection. 48. Murger, 172. 49. Murger, 141. 50. “Oh! vitrier! / J’allai à lui. ‘Mon brave homme, il ne faut pas mourir de faim,’ ” and so on. As cited in OC 1, 1309.

3

THE “V ICTORI A N B AUDEL A IRE ”

1. Teukolsky, 711. 2. As quoted by Teukolsky, 711. Jameson is discussing “La Mort des amants” and finds the lines “soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique” also “mediated by the most doubtful pre-Raphaelite mystique.” Jameson only uses the descriptive “Victorian” intensified by “worst” and associates this worst with “the properly dreadful nature of [the poem’s] contents.” He contrasts this “worst” with Baudelaire’s “tactful” conveyance of this material and, again with his “tactful” and “refined” “mastery of the raw material of bad taste,” thus recasting the standard argument about Baudelaire and journalism (discussed in chapter 2) to apply to Baudelaire’s relationship to Victorian materials (Jameson, “Baudelaire as Modernist and Post Modernist,” 259). 3. As I discuss in greater detail in chapter 6, this genealogy of the modern and the postmodern no longer goes unchallenged, especially as work has emerged that convincingly argues for modernism’s perpetual indebtedness to and engagement with popular culture, even “Kitsch.” See, for poetry and poetics in particular, Daniel Newton



NOTES

NOTES

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Tiffany, “Kitsching the Cantos,” Modernism/Modernity 12.2 (2005), 329–337. Emily Salines, Alchemy and Amalgam: Translation in the Works of Charles Baudelaire (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004). Salines, 21. The passage from Emerson appears in Hygiene, OC 1, 673–674. OC 1, 1490. See Robert Kopp’s edition of Petits Poëmes en prose (Paris: Corti, 1969) 297–299. Emerson’s line is “Like sick men in hospitals we change only from bed to bed,” also as quoted by Kopp, 351. In a projected preface to Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire includes a “Note sur les plagiats”: “Thomas Gray. Edgar Poe (2 passages). Longfellow (2 passages). Stace. Virgile (tout le morceau d’Andromaque). Eschyle. Victor Hugo,” OC 1, 184. I am thinking, particularly, of the experimental techniques defined by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith as “Uncreative Writing.” See Dworkin, Craig and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds., Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2010). As cited by Salines, 136, 137. Salines, 140–141. OC 2, 609. Jones, 5. My translation. Jones lists the following short-lived efforts: Quinzaine littéraire (1817–1818), Archives philosophiques (July 1817–1818), Minerve française (1820–1824), Tablettes Universelles (1820–1821), among others. The founders of the Revue Britannique dismissed several longer-lived journals: La Revue encyclopédique (1819–1830), Les Annales des lettres, des arts, de l’architecture, des sciences, et de l’industrie (1820–1829), and the Mercure étranger (1823–1830) as too journalistic and polemic, while the Journal des Savants was too close to the government (7). Jones, 33. From the November 1822 issue of the Edinburgh Review. Jones, 37. Ibid., 41. As quoted by Jones, 42. Ibid. As quoted by Jones, 43. Ibid., 50. Cf Margaret Cohen et al. Jones, 79. Ibid., 82–83. Sterne: “Présentation de Révélation Magnétique,” 247; “Salon de 1859,” 630; Godwin, Richardson: “Salon de 1846,” 457; Dickens: “Puisque réalisme il y a,” 55; Dickens, Byron, Bulwer-Lytton:



232

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

233

“Madame Bovary,” 79; Tennyson, Byron: “L’esprit et le style de M Villemain,” 194; “Lettre à Jules Janin,” 237, 238; “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe,” 336; Tennyson: “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” 702; Hood: “Lettre à Jules Janin,” 239; “Salon de 1859,” 638; Hogarth: “Quelques caricaturistes étrangers”; Hook, Hunt, Millais: “Théophile Gautier,” 123; “Salon de 1859,” 609; Reynolds (throughout the salons). Baudelaire also requested that copies of Les Épaves be sent to Rossetti (unspecified, but D. G. is presumed) and Robert Browning. See chapter 1. OC 1, 687. Baudelaire takes up this discussion of realism in his published essay on Madame Bovary, in which he seems to want to distinguish realism as a “new method of creation” associated with clarity of concept from the kind of moral accusation, on the one hand, and obsession with superfluous details, on the other, that it had come to signify in France (OC 2, 80). Cf. Courbet’s L’atelier du peintre (1855). Baudelaire made the painter remove the image, but the ghostly form of Jeanne Duval is still visible. OC 2, 58. OC 2, 702–703. OC 2, 702. OC 2, 688. OC 2, 609. As cited in OC 2, 1419. Ibid. Marginalia (introduction), in Edgar Allan Poe, The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II The Brevities: Pinakidia, Marginalia, and Other Works, ed.B. R. Pollin (New York: Gordian, 1985), 109. The letter was from the novelist Ernest Feydeau, whose novel Fanny Baudelaire had praised. See Claude Pichois and Jean Zeigler, Baudelaire (Paris: Juillard, 1987), 374; in English, Baudelaire trans. Graham Robb (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 248. Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” in Essays and Reviews (New York: Viceroy, 1984), 90. See chapter 1. Thomas Hood. Selected Poems, ed. Joy Flint (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), 113. Chapter 1. Times (London), March 26, 1844. OC 2, 1399. Baudelaire cites Hood’s Whims and Oddities in Salon de 1859, as Margaret Gilman points out in her 1935 essay. See OC 2, 1343. As told by William Henry Hudson, A Quiet Corner in a Library (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1915), 25.



NOTES

NOTES

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

“The Poetic Principle” (1850), in Essays and Reviews. “On Thomas Hood,” Broadway Journal, August 9, 1845 (Essays, 274). Essays, 276. Cf. Derrida’s discussion of the prose poems as “gift” to the editor Arsène Houssaye, as cited in chapter 2. Scott, 184–186. Scott also suggests that nothing “actually proves the callousness of the mother’s request for the rope, even if that request is commercially motivated” (186). Debates about the verifiability of the actions and motives of fictional characters seem unlikely to bear fruit, even allowing that we are to understand the painter’s perceptions and therefore his narration as clouded. What is certainly “true” is that readers of the text are left with the strong impression of a mother selling pieces of the rope that hanged her son. OC 1, 328. For more details, see OC 1, 1339. Scott, 186. OC 1, 330. Essays, 275. OC 1, 330. As cited in Scott, 187. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992), 86. Ibid., 86. Jared Stark, “The Price of Authenticity: Modernism and Suicide in Baudelaire’s ‘La Corde,’ ” Modernism/modernity, 14.3 (2007), 505. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 87–88. William Dorling, Memoirs of Dora Greenwell (London: 1885), 31. Dorling, 32. Dorling, 77. “Desdichado,” in Carmina Crucis (London: Bell and Daldy, 1869), 21–22. See also Janet Gray, “Dora Greenwell,” Victorian Women Poets, ed. William B. Thesing, Dictionary of Literary Biography 199 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1999), 140–148. Gerard de Nerval, Les Filles de Feu et Les Chimères (Paris: Flammarion, 1965), 240.

4

PASSING S TR A NGE : C HRISTINA R OSSETTI ’S UNUSUA L D E A D

1. Benjamin 4, 319; Baudelaire as quoted by Benjamin 4, 21. Baudelaire’s original from Fusées XIV: 663. 2. Benjamin 4, 324. 3. As quoted by Alison Chapman, The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (New York: Saint Martin’s, 2000), 83. 4. As quoted by Chapman, 83.



234

235

5. As Janet Wolff notes, George Sand could gain access to such an experience in drag, but “she could not adopt the nonexistent role of a flâneuse.” “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” in The Problems of Modernity, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989), 148. Deborah Nord, in contrast, sees a central role for “the particular urban vision of the female observer, novelist or investigator” in women’s narratives and defines a role for female spectatorship. See Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995), 12. 6. Susan Conley, “Rossetti’s Cold Women: Irony and Liminal Fantasy in the Death Lyrics,” The Culture of Christina Rossetti, ed. Mary Arseneau, Antony Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Athens: Ohio UP, 1999), 263. 7. Margaret Reynolds, “Speaking Unlikenesses,” Arseneau et al., 6. 8. Chapman, 81. 9. Catherine Maxwell, “The Poetic Context of Christina Rossetti’s ‘After Death,’ ” English Studies 76.2 (1995), 154. 10. This is not to suggest that Rossetti avoided the topos of sexual transgression in terms of representation, but such aesthetic representation was not in itself transgressive—it was rather, by midcentury, quite common. Rossetti often represented the “fallen woman,” and the relationship between such work and her volunteer work with “fallen women” at Highgate Penitentiary has attracted a great deal of critical attention. See, for example, Diane D’Amico, “Equal before God: Christina Rossetti and the Fallen Women of Highgate Penitentiary,” in Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Antony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1992), 67–83, and Roxanne Eberle, “Rewriting the ‘vile text’: Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Social Reform,” in Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1972–1897: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 168–201. See also my comments on Thomas Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs,” below. 11. Georges Bataille in particular insists on the relationship between taboo and transgression: “the transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it” (63); he speaks of “the successful transgression which, in maintaining the prohibition, maintains it in order to benefit from it” (38), in Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986). 12. Armstrong’s account of expressive theory sees it as developing “metaphorically from a cognitive account of consciousness, in which mediation between subject and object was the constitutive structure of mind, and the idealist implication that the subject constructs the other as a category of mind. Categories of mind are transposed into emotional terms: poetry negotiates the relations of feeling, object of feeling, and feeling subject,” 339–340.



NOTES

NOTES

13. Catherine Maxwell, “The Poetic Context of Christina Rossetti’s ‘After Death,’’’ English Studies 76.2 (1995), 144–145. Letter to William Michael Rossetti, April 28, 1849, expresses reservations about showing poetry that “could be construed into love personals” to Thomas Woolner. 14. Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1996), 166–167. 15. From her earliest writings, including Maude as well as her first self-published Verses of 1847, Rossetti displays a clear fascination for the topos, although her treatment of it changes quite early from what seems like youthful imitation to (almost equally youthful) subversion. 16. Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” Language, CounterMemory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP,1977), 33. 17. Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 19. 18. This tradition has attracted extensive critical attention. For booklength studies, see, particularly, Barbara T. Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988); Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992); and Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). For painting, see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), 25–63. 19. The phrase is Susan Conley’s. See note 5. 20. For a discussion of Elizabeth Siddal in the context of death and aestheticism, see Bronfen, 168–178. 21. See, most famously, William Holman Hunt, “The Lady of Shalott” (1857); and John William Waterhouse, “The Lady of Shalott” (1888), but a host of less well-known works were produced throughout the later part of the century. See Dijkstra, 37–41. Catherine Maxwell identifies “Porphyria’s Lover” as an important precedent for Rossetti’s “After Death,” 153. Constance Hassett and James Richardson complicate notions of the gendered reading and writing of aestheticized female death in Tennyson, Keats, and Browning, suggesting that in “The Lady of Shalott,” for example, “the poetic dying that looks like passivity and ‘effeminacy’ is revealed as a source of poetic authority.” “Looking at Elaine: Keats, Tennyson, and the Poetic Gaze” in Arthurian Women: A Casebook (New York: Routledge, 1996), 298. 22. Edgar Allan Poe, “Life in Death [The Oval Portrait],” The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1983), 734–738. Also see Bronfen’s discussion, 112–117. 23. Lootens, 80. Elaine Showalter describes how women psychiatric patients were dressed up and photographed as Ophelias to “document” an Ophelia complex; actresses were subsequently invited



236

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

237

to observe these staged performances for authentic technique. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 77–94. Bram Dijkstra catalogues some fifteen different Ophelia paintings in addition to Millais’ famous portrayal, 40–46. As cited in Lootens, 80. In painting, it provides the inspiration for George Frederic Watts (Found Drowned, 1848–1850), Gustave Doré (The Bridge of Sighs), and Abraham Solomon (Drowned, Drowned, 1860). For a more detailed discussion of this poem’s influence on these artists with relation to the topos of female suicide, see Bates, 135–136. Thomas Hood, Poetical Works of Thomas Hood, with a Critical Memoir by William Michael Rossetti (New York: Routledge, 1874), 21. In a letter to Dante Gabriel, Rossetti remarks that one of Siddal’s poems “reminds me of Tom Hood at his highest.” The reference is to the poem “Gone” in a letter of February 6, 1865. In The Letters of Christina Rossetti Vol. 1, ed. Antony H. Harrison (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1997), 225. Hood, “The Bridge of Sighs,” 119–122. Mary Furley reportedly said that “she regretted exceedingly that the gentleman had saved her, as her sufferings must now be greater than ever.” See The Times (March 26, 1844), 8. Subsequent articles detail her trial, with its accounts of workhouse conditions, and her conviction (April 1, 17), and letters to the editor express the public outcry (April 19, May 2). Also see chapter 3. Bronfen elaborates her considerably more nuanced and complex argument over the course of a chapter, 395–435. Christina Georgina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862 edition), in The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. Rebecca Crump (New York: Penguin, 2001), 31. All citations are to this edition. Conley, esp. 270. Maxwell, 155. Reynolds, 7. As cited by Bronfen, 97–98. Reynolds, 7. James Richardson also points out that the extended space between the rhyme here accentuates the sense of distance and detachment. “May,” Crump, 45. “Winter: My Secret,” 41. “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”), 52. Other ghostly poems include “The Convent Threshold” (1858), “The Hour and the Ghost” (1856), “An End” (1859), and arguably the projection of the living into the ghostly in “Wife to Husband” (1861) and “Remember” (1849). Crump, 22.



NOTES

NOTES

42. Suzanne Clarke both documents and challenges the modernist rejection of the sentimental in Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991). 43. Margaret Linley discusses varieties of critical and writerly unease (both Victorian and contemporary) with the term “poetess.” With particular attention to Maude, Linley also explores the relationship between “poetess” and death. “Dying to Be a Poetess: The Conundrum of Christina Rossetti,” in Arseneau et al., 285–314. 44. See Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (New York: Harvester, 1992), esp. chapters on Hemans and Landon, 8–77. 45. In British Women Poets of the 19th Century, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet (New York: Meridian, 1996), 229. 46. As cited in Leighton, 144–145. 47. Leighton, 145. 48. Conley, 266. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), 235. 52. Diana Fuss speculates that “the broken physicality of verse aligns poetry, more than any other literary genre, with corporeal disintegration.” “Corpse Poem,” Critical Inquiry 30.1 (2003), 27. 53. Letter to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, March 1865. Letters 1234. 54. As quoted in Benjamin 4, 32. Original OC 1, 291. 55. Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985). 56. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 43–44.

5

G OBLIN M ETRICS

1. Antony Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988), 37. 2. Critics of the “Miltonic tradition” include Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1984); and, more recently, Kathleen Vejvoda, who argues for a greater relevance for Comus than for Paradise Lost in her “The Fruit of Charity: Comus and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market,” Victorian Poetry 38. 4 (Winter, 2000), 555–578. Sabine Coelch-Foisner traces the “Come buy” refrain of the goblin chant to Herrick’s “Cherryripe” from Hesperides: “Cherry ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry/ Full and fair ones, come and buy.” See “Rossetti’s Goblin Market,” in Explicator



238

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

239

(September 1, 2002), 61 (1), (28). Maxwell associates “goblin poetics” with Keats, Coleridge, and Tennyson in “Tasting the Forbidden Fruit: Gender, Intertextuality, and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market,” in Arsenau et al. Jerome McGann, “The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti,” Critical Inquiry 10.1, Canons (September, 1983), 132. The past several decades have witnessed a number of impressive readings of the poem, which alternately cast it as liberal or conservative, regenerative or repressive, feminist or antifeminist; studies have convincingly demonstrated its engagement with discourses of imperialism, market capitalism, racism, homosexuality, anorexia, and the list goes on—so long, in fact, that the list itself has become a stock element of any essay’s introduction as the goblins’ signature syntax seems to infect even the critical discourse it inspires. See Sean C. Grass, “Nature’s Perilous Variety in Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ ” for a discussion of the semantic importance of lists for the poem, as well as for an impressive list of these conflicting interpretations as of 1996;Nineteenth-Century Literature 51. 3 (December, 1996), 356–358. For another acute analysis of the poem’s reception, see Chapman, “The Afterlife of Poetry: ‘Goblin Market,’ ” in her Afterlife. How the poem’s conflicts play out thematically, or how they conceal or represent engagements with history less explicitly poetic than political, has been a frequent focus of the “Rossetti Renaissance” in recent years. Popular topics have included economics, see Richard Menke, “The Political Economy of Fruit,” in Arsenau et al, 105–136; and Herbert F. Tucker, “Rossetti’s Goblin Marketing: Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye,” Representations 82 (Spring, 2003), 117–133; and Rossetti’s work among fallen women in Highgate Penitentiary, see, most recently, Roxanne Eberle, Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1972–1897: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress (New York: Palgrave, 2002); as well as D. M. R. Bentley, “The Meretricious and the Meritorious in Goblin Market: A Conjecture and an Analysis,” in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987). Harrison, 37. See Yopie Prins, “Victorian Meters,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 89–113. My research follows directly from suggestions made in this essay. Remarking that “Goblin Market’s” “remarkably mercantile” language and market setting is typical of nursery rhyme but foreign to most literary Victorian poetry, Elizabeth Helsinger argues these generic boundaries also signify socially, so that when Lizzie and Laura leave home “they cross a fictive but strongly invested boundary separating not only serious poetry from nursery rhymes but also moral from economic space, private from public and . . .—underwriting and sustaining these distinctions—female from male.” See “Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’ ” ELH 58.4



NOTES

NOTES

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

(Winter, 1991), 903. Maxwell reads Lizzie’s theft of goblin “juices” as a successful female appropriation of male poetic “output”; the goblins become gender-reversed descendants of Keats’ faery seducers in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” while lexical echoes of Tennyson and Coleridge identify goblin song with a male-authored prosodic heritage. In terms of historical prosody, I have in mind, in addition to Prins, Jason Rudy’s work on the Spasmodics, for example, “Rhythmic Intimacy, Spasmodic Epistemology,” in Victorian Poetry 42.4 (Winter, 2004), 451–472; and Meredith Martin’s discussion of Hopkins’ markings in the context of metrical nationalism in “Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Stigma of Meter,” in Victorian Studies 50.2 (Winter, 2008), 243–253. Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992), 1. Marjorie Perloff, “The Invention of Collage,” in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003), 72. The rich history of domestic and folk art assemblage is, however, documented in Herta Wescher, Collage, trans. Robert E. Wolf (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1968), Chapter 1. Of particular relevance to Rossetti, we may find the family album, the valentine (of which Rossetti also writes poetic examples) and assemblages of “memory chests” decorated with bridal wreaths, veils, flowers, scrapbooks that assembled artifacts from travels, and children’s and ladies’ albums as well as découpage folding screens made up of prints, plates, poems, and flowers (11–12). Collage: Personalities, Concepts, Techniques, Harriet Grossman Janis and Rudi Blesh (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1967), 4. Although technically Rossetti was neither schoolgirl nor housewife, it seems unlikely that her identity as Victorian spinster would change her affiliation in such a paradigm to the “serious artist” she was. Perloff, 47. On the relationship of goblin fruit and language, see especially— among many others—Steven Connor, “ ‘Speaking Likenesses’: Language and Repetition in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market,” Victorian Poetry 22 (1984), 439–448. Crump, 5. Edwin Guest, A History of English Rhythms (London: W. Pickering, 1838), 7. Guest, 8. James Orchard Halliwell, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (London: John Russell Smith, 1849), vii. Conley, Arsenau et al., 260–284. See Lorraine Kooistra, “Goblin Market as Cross-Audienced Poem,” in Arsenau et al.



240

241

21. The Poetical Works of John Skelton, ed. Alexander Dyce (London: Thomas Rodd, 1843). The volume contains an appendix of what Dyce understands as Skelton’s metrical predecessors, entitled “Extracts from pieces which are written in, or which contain examples of, the metre called Skeltonical.” 22. Isaac Disraeli, Amenities of Literature. 23. This position is somewhat complicated by the fact that Guest does not actually believe in feet per se. Guest, 177. 24. Guest, 102–103. 25. Saintsbury, 280. 26. Crump, 6. 27. Crump, 6. 28. This rhyme has been interpreted variously as a taxation allegory and, more recently, banned in British schools for racist and colonialist overtones, although here its resonance may be limited to those more generally mercantile themes Helsinger associates with nursery rhyme. 29. Crump, 7. 30. A particularly biting example from the Goblin Market collection is in the sonnet “A Triad,” in which, of three women who “sang of love together” in their youth, “one temperately/ Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;” and “droned in sweetness like a fattened bee” (23). 31. See Lootens, 166–167. 32. In addition to the obvious resonance suggested by a proffered fruit that brings on a wasting disease that distracts from work, Tennyson’s poem also emphasizes the sonorous play of “root” and “fruit” and favors the compound: “sun-steeped”; “full-juiced”; “fast-rooted” in particular look forward to Rossetti’s “sugar-baited” (234); “leafcrowned” (291); and “goblin-ridden,” among many others. 33. See Christina Rossetti, Maude, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: NYU Press Women’s Classics, 1993), 24–25.

6

“W HEN I A M DE A D, M Y DE A REST . . .”: M ODERNISM R EMEMBERS A ND F ORGETS R OSSETTI 1. Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land, 156. 2. For an early example of such work, see Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995). Nicholls brings a pan-European perspective to Anglo-American modernism and includes discussions not only of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, but Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. For an interrogation of the terminology of modernism in this new context, see Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8.3 (2001), 493– 519. For a recent cross-class analysis of twentieth-century modernism



NOTES

NOTES

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

in the context of globalism, see Andreas Huyssen, “High-Low in an Expanded Field,” Modernism/Modernity 9.3 (2002) 363–374. Adapted from Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Donald Gray (New York: Longmans, 2001), 29–30. See, for example, Prins’ Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997); and Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005). Armstrong, 320. Ibid. Toril Moi, Sexual Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1985), 66. Moi, 67. Gilbert and Gubar are not singled out in isolation; Annette Kolodny and Mary Jehlen are critiqued on similar grounds. Moi, 24. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1956), 45. Jerome McGann, “The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti,” 132. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (New York: Henry Holt, 1950). The first edition was published in 1938; the fourth in 1976. Brooks and Warren, 183. See Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); many of the essays in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, for example, Isobel Armstrong’s introduction, “Misrepresentation: Codes of Affect in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry.” Virginia Jackson, “American Victorian Poetry: The Transatlantic Poetic,” Victorian Poetry 43.2 (2005), 158. Jackson, 157. As quoted in Constance Hassett, Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005), 99. Hassett, 99. In what offers a happy, if somewhat ironic, historical corrective, Hassett’s book was awarded the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism from the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University. To be fair, New Criticism, or at least some of it, acknowledged the problems with focusing on a text in isolation. If Brooks and Warren advocate in the teaching of poetry that “emphasis should be kept on the poem as a poem” and that “the poem in itself, if literature is to be studied as literature, remains finally the object for study,” in the next sentence, they somewhat grudgingly acknowledge interest “in the poem as a historical or ethical document” as a reasonable ground of investigation even if they maintain that “one must grasp the poem as a literary construct before it can offer any real illumination as a document,” xi–xv.



242

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

243

Hassett, 60. Ibid., 61. Poems, 45. Ibid., 45–46. Nancy Gish, “Discarnate Desire: T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Dissociation,” in Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot, ed. Nancy Gish and Cassandra Laity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). Gish, 108. Ibid., 110. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 44. As quoted in Koestenbaum, 121. “The Hard and Soft in French Poetry” (1918), in Ezra Pound, Literary Essays (Westport: Greenwood, 1979), 286. “The Prose Tradition in Verse” (1914), Pound, 373–374. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: California UP, 1971), 8. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, Pound/Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship (New York: New Directions, 1982), 172. “I am Christina Rossetti” (1930), in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol. 4 (London: Hogarth, 1967), 56. Woolf, 57. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 57–58. Ibid., 59. Ford Madox Ford, Memories and Impressions (New York: Echo, 1985), 60. Ford, “The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti (review), Critical Essays, Max Saunders and Richard Strong, eds. (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 16. Ibid. Ibid. Ford, Memories, 68–69. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 63–64.

C ODA 1. As cited by Valerie Tinkler-Vallani in “Atheism and Belief in Shelley, Swinburne, and Christina Rossetti,” in Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle: The Fusion and Confusion of Literary Periods, ed. C. C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 332–333. 2. Laura Riding and Robert Graves, for example, included Hopkins in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), claiming him as a modernist by virtue of his “extraordinary strictness in the use of words,” “unconventional notation,” and what they saw as his difficulty.



NOTES

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NOTES


3. Gerard Manley Hopkins in a letter to his mother, March 5, 1872. Selected Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. William Henry Gardner (London: Penguin, 1985), 174. 4. Judith Nixon, “ ‘Goldengrove unleaving’: Hopkins’ ‘Spring and Fall,’ Christina Rossetti’s ‘Mirrors of Life and Death,’ and the Politics of Inclusion,” Victorian Poetry 43.4 (Winter, 2005), 473–484.


absence, 30, 36, 102, 136, 137, 140, 141; and desire, 132, 168–171; and language, 171, 173, 177, 191–195, 199, 200; Shakespearean “absence of character,” 128 abstraction, 106, 151, 184, 191, 197–204 accent, tonic, 42 Acker, Kathy, 222n17 aesthetics, 4–5, 10, 13, 17, 107–114 passim; and Le Coupeur, 81, 85; and L’Innovateur, 69; and the prose poem, 19–51 passim, 58–60; and the quotidian, 85–87; and transnationalism, 95, 99–102, see also corpse, female death, violence, “Whig Aesthetic” alexandrine, 23, 41, 48, 73–74, 87, 147, 226n43 anglophilia, French, 90–91, 97–99 anonymity, 17, 69, 102, 128 architecture, 1, 8, 212; of clouds, 58; “secret,” 224n3 argot, 50, 53, 55, 96, 105 Armstrong, Isobel, 125, 183, 185, 188, 190, 200, 221n1, 235n12, 242n14 art criticism, Baudelaire, see individual titles Austen, Jane, 181–182 authorship, 66, 96, 131 autonomy, 133, 137, 140–142; as platinum, 203; poetic, 147, 202, 203

avant-garde, 4, 95, 179; Rossetti considered as, 145, 148–149 Babuts, Nicolae, 224n5, 229n58 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 223n19 Balzac, Honoré de, 54, 71, 102 Barnes, Djuna, 179 Barthes, Roland, 8–9 Bataille, Georges, 7, 8–9, 235n11 “beau bizarre,” le, 26–31 Benjamin, Walter: and allegory, 196; and Baudelaire’s art criticism, 30, 225n10; and the classical, 30; and the crowd, 102; and journalism, 55, 57, 65, 66–68, 70; and modernity, 1–2, 30, 54, 102, 124, 180; and shock, 1, 2, 7, 8, 54, 124; and temporality, 30, see also flâneur Bennet, Elizabeth, 181 Bennet, Mrs., 181–182; “Mrs. Bennet problem,” 186 Bentley, D.M.R., 239n4 Bersani, Leo, 224 Biard, F.A., 227 birdsong, women’s poetry as, 119, 126, 143, 169, 209 Blin, George, 102, 224n3 Blood, Susan, 228n57 body, the, 61–62, 98, 106, 140, 141, 162, 172; female body, 5, 61, 132, 141; Oriental body, 28; verbal body, 141, 172, 186, 196, 197, 198, see also corpse



GE N E R A L I N DE X

GENER A L INDE X

body parts: anus, 8; belly, 137; breast, 35, 168; cheeks, 51, 151, 152, 155, 159, 168, 229n59; ears, 132, 159, 165, 208, 209; eyes, 25, 41, 43, 44, 58, 59, 131, 132, 164, 165, 193, 227n49; fingers, 162, 165; hair, 20, 107, 167, 173, 174, see also “La Chevelure, Un Hémisphère dans une chevelure”; hand, firm, 209, see also “pure hand”; head, 20, 61, 63–65, 76–77, 78, 132, 139, 162, 163, 168; lips, 107, 153, 162, 175; lungs, 211; mouth, 37, 153, 167, 169, 174; neck, 58, 111, 165, 214; nose, 209; palate, 152; tail, 63–65, 165; teeth, 153–154, 168, 171, 179, 205; throat, 153; tongue, 151, 153–154; vulva, see London see also corpse, “La Corde,” “Une Martyre” bouts-rimés, 145 Boileau, Nicolas, 25–26, 69, 225n17 Bradley, Katherine, see Field, Michael “Bridge of Sighs, The,” see Hood, Thomas Bronfen, Elisabeth, 126, 130–131, 133, 141, 234n20, 234n22, 236n18, 237n30 Brooker, Jewel Spears, 222 Brooks, Cleanth, 185, 187–190, see also Understanding Poetry Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 133, 138, 187 Browning, Robert, 5, 128, 133, 134, 141, 233n27, 234n21 Brummel, “Beau” (George Bryan), 102 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 99, 232 Byron, George Gordon, 8, 10, 89, 93, 99, 102, 232n27

Castille, Hyppolite, 100 Cayley, Charles, 207 Champfleury (Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson), 73, 99–101 Chapman, Alison, 125, 239n4 Chateaubriand, 47 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 155, 159, 162, 208n54 Chesters, Graham, 39, 228 class, 5, 18, 58, 90, 107–108, 110–111, 114, 117–118, 119–130, 138; and meter, 148, 159–160, 219, 241 classicism, 5, 8, 10, 14, 23–30 passim, 31, 48–50, 62, 74, 98, 125, 223, 225, 227–228 cliché, 13, 15, 73, 111, 137, 209 clothing, 75, 106, 196, 202; boots, shoes, see L’Innovateur; cloak, 195, 202; mourning, 202; shroud, 82, 132, 133, see also Le Coupeur, fashion, hats, tailoring Coelch-Foisner, Sabine, 238n2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 128, 146, 239n2, 240n7 collage, 16, 95, 240n10; as gendered term, 150; metrical, 149–151, 208; phonetic, 153; and scrapbooks, 150, 175, 240n10 Collinson, James, 207 commerce, 14, 17, 53, 61, 69, 85; and journalism, 48, 67–69, 78–79, see also commodification, “La Corde,” “Le Coupeur,” “Goblin Market,” hawker’s cry, “L’Innovateur,” “Le Mauvais Vitrier” commodification, 96, 113, 166, 239n7; and journalism, 55, 64–67, 74–75, 80; and translation, 96; as Victorian, 90; and women, 61, 138 composition, 12, 20, 23, 64, 125, 129–131, 141; scene of, 14–16,



246

150, 212, 225n17; time to completion of, 145 Conley, Susan, 133, 141, 236n19 Connor, Steven, 240n14 consonants: alliterative, 137, 152; distributive, 152; erotics of, 154; formation of, 153–154; and goblins, 152–154, 164; labial, 153; liquid, 41, 153–154; plosive, 193; trembling, 153, 163; voiced v. unvoiced, 152–153, 164; whisper, 153, see also under body parts (lips, mouth, tongue) Cooper, Edith, see Field, Michael Corpse, child, 110–111, 114 Corpse, female, 10; autonomy of, 133; in Baudelaire, 61–62, 86, 104, 105–108, 116; of Clarissa Harlow, 133; genre of (Rossetti), as model for poetry, 131–134; irony of, 136, 141–142, 184, 192, 202, 214, 219; tradition of, 126–131, see also death, female, Hood, Thomas, “Une Martyre” corruption: as aesthetic procedure, 47, 87; of English prosody, 160; of matter, 141; of national prosody, 94; of the press, 68, 159–160; sexual, 167, 168, see also decomposition Corsaire-Satan, Le, 57, 70–73, 76, 79, 230n31, 230n32, 231n42 Coupeur, Le, 75–83, 85, 202, 231n41 Courbet, Gustave, 99, 233 Crépet, Jacques, 99, 229 crowds, 1, 120, 128, 142, 229 cutting, 7, 64–65, 67, 71, 74–75, 85, 98, 111–112, 113, 150, 202 dactyl, see under meter D’Amico, Diane, 235

247

Dandyism, 102 Darcy, Mr. Fitzwilliam, 182 David, Jacques-Louis, 23 death, 9, 47, 116, 123–143 passim, 192–194; aestheticized, 106–108, 127–128, 131; aestheticizing, 134; as being, 203; child, 107, 110–111, 114; and Eliot, T.S., 203 death, female: as cleansing, 106, 132 female-authored tradition of, 138–139, 141; and impersonality, 141–143; and irony, 135–137; liquid, 130; male-authored tradition of, 106–107, 120, 126, 127–131, 236n21; as negation, 193; as norm, 127; as nurturing, 193–195; as object of desire, 130, 140; and Poe, 126; of poetry, 35; and poetry, 123–142 passim, 176; and the self, 140–142 see also corpse, drowning, ghost, pun, suicide decomposition, 131, 141 Delacroix, Eugène, 72–73, 226n22 de Man, Paul, 2, 3–4, 221n8, 228n57 De Quincey, Thomas, 94, 128 Dernière Mode, La, 202 Derrida, Jacques, 113–114, 65, 234n52 Desfontaines, Abbé Pierre, 31 desire, 169, 173; for androgyny, 200; for autonomy, 133; baulked, 173, 174; to change beds, 19; and death, 120, 130, 140; and Eliot, T.S., 202–203; extension of, as longing, 199–200; fulfilled, 170; in “Goblin Market,” 161–165; and language, 165, 172, 200; to leave, 120; male-directed, 132; poetics of, 168, 171–174, 177, 197, 199–203, 212; and



GENER A L INDE X

GENER A L INDE X

desire—Continued representation, 175; same-sex, 6; as staining, 130, 132; text as mediation of, 175; undefined object of, 199; unfulfilled, 199–200; and withholding, 196; woman as object of, 132, 196, see also “Exposition Universelle de 1855,” “La Corde” Dickens, Charles, 2, 99–101, 187, 216, 232n27 Dickinson, Emily, 187, 189 Diderot, Denis, 8 Dijkstra, Bram, 236n18 Disegni, Silvia, 57, 66 D’Israeli, Isaac, 158, 159 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.), 181, 187 Doré, Gustave, 237n25 Douay, Emile, 60 drowning, 106, 108, 120, 129–130, 133, 237n25, see also Hood, Thomas Dubois, W .E. B., 8 Durer, Albrecht, 81 Duval, Jeanne, 99, 233 Dworkin, Craig, 232n10 Dyce, Alexander, 158, 241n21 dynamics of contexture, 57–59, 62, 125 eavesdropping, see stealth Eberle, Roxanne, 235n10 Eden, 64, 146 The Edinburgh Revue, 97 Elégant, L’, 78–79, 231 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 2, 5, 6, 179, 180, 181, 183, 222; and Baudelaire, 221; and dissociation, 202–203, 207; and impersonality, 143, 202–203; and Swinburne, 217 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 94 English language, 92, 101–102, 202, 206; and Baudelaire, 93–97, as exotic, 101–103

English painting, 103–104, see also individual painters Equisses de la littérature et de la société parisiennes, 198 Exotic, the: foreign as, 5, 27–31, 53, 101, 116, 147, 151; English (language) or British (culture) as, 5, 54; journalism as, 54; lexical, 151; Paris streets as (“domestic exotic”), 30, 54 expression, 5, 14–15; alternative models to, 16, 134, 174–175; of beauty, 23; expressive theory, 125–126, 185, 195, 200, 235; and impersonality, 143, 191, 195; and realism, 100; rejected by modernism, 189; and women’s writing, 6, 125–126, 134, 140, 169, 184, 185 fallenness, and the prose poems, 58, 60, 64, 65; like sexual fall, 74, 106, 107, see also “La Corde,” “Le Mauvais Vitrier” fallen woman, 106, 107, 116, 129, 156; fall literalized, 108; and “Lady of Shalott,” 120; substituted for poor woman, 107, see also Furley, Mary; Hood, Thomas; suicide fashion, 5, 38, 50, 78, 80, 84, 98, 103, 116, 202 Feldman, Jessica, 221n1 feuilleton, 66–67, 229n9 Feydeau, Ernest, 104 Field, Michael (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), 7, 8, 222n18 Figaro, Le, 110, 113 flâneur, the, 1, 10, 121, 124, 128, 221n2 Flaubert, Gustave, 181, 210, 231, 233 Ford, Ford Madox, 145, 149, 176, 181, 210–214; and Pound, 204–207



248

GENER A L INDE X

Furley, Mary, 107–180, 110, 112, 120, 129–130, 237n29 Fuss, Diana, 219–220, 238n52 Gates, Barbara, 236n18 Gautier, Théophile, 97, 102–103 Gender, 3; and beauty, 38; and courtship, 196; and expressive theory, 125–126; and Ford, Ford Madox, 212; and form, 6, 148, 184; and Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 217–218; and modernism, 5–6, 149, 179, 187, 202, 204; and New Criticism, 183, 187–188; and poetry, 18, 38, 108, 116, 120, 121, 123, 127, 130, 185–187; and Pound, 5, 205, 207; and prejudice, 6, 184, 191, 207, 213, 215; and pure poetry, 184, 196; and Victorian era, 3, 5–6, 179–182, see also corpse, death, expression, form, meter, misogyny, poetess, shock, stealth, transgression Genius, 24, 38, 73, 82, 95, 211, see also Kant, Immanuel; Hugo, Victor ghost, genre of, 135–138, 142, 237n40; as haunting, 127; Ruskin as, 214; Victorian era as, 109, see also death Gide, André, 2 Gilbert, Sandra, 5, 179, 181, 183–184, 186, 208, 214, 222n14, 238n2, 242n8 Gilman, Margaret, 233n47 Gish, Nancy, 202–203 Godwin, William, 99, 232n27 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 232n10 Goldsmith, Oliver, 99, 232n27 Grass, Sean C., 239n4 Gray, Janet, 234n9 Gray, Thomas, 94 Greenwell, Dora, 115–121, 129; and illness, 117–118; and Nerval, Gerard de, 119, see also Hood, Thomas, rhythm



form: Baudelairean shock and, 2; in classicism, 25, 35–36; death and, 107, 126–127, 134, 139–140; destruction of, 60, 87; duplicity and, 63, 125–126, 134; English context, in France, 98, 101; as gendered, 5–6, 15–16, 60–61, 121, 125–126, 138, 142, 149–150, 158, 169, 175, 179–214; irony as, 63; journalism and, 55–56, 60, 64–67, 70–72, 85; language and, 3, 8, 64, 134, 153–154, 192–194, 197, 201; material and, 55–56, 87, 195–196, see also Coupeur, Le; materiality and, 57, 60–62, 87, 141, 148–149, 154; modernism and, 5, 6, 16, 90, 109, 149, 179–180, 183; parlor games and, 145–150; politics of, 148, 156–157, 184, 190, 214–215, see also prosody, historical; prose poem, 20, 31–33, 47–50, 60, 87; purity of, 17–18, 87, 91; the quotidian and, 85–86; recombinant, 15–17, 158, 154–155, 175; semantics of, 155–156, 167, 169, 181, 195, see also prosody, historical; social, 9, 15–16, 118, 150, 176, 194, 196, 201; tradition and, 15–16, 17, 147–148, 150, 155, 157–158; transgression and, 2, 8–9, 17–18, 26–29, 145–146; in Victorian poetry, 121, 138, 145–149, 183, 184, 190–191, 208; women and, 15–16, 60–62, 67, 74; see also collage, individual titles and poetic forms, meter Foucault, Michel, 127 French language, 25, 42, 98 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 241n2

249

GENER A L INDE X

Gubar, Susan, see Gilbert, Sandra Guest, Edwin, 148, 153–154, 159–160, 162, 241n23 Guys, Constantin, 60, 62, 101–102 Habermas, Jürgen, 4, 5 Halliwell, James Orchard, 148, 156–159 Hassett, Constance, 190–191, 196, 201, 236n21, 242n19 hatmaking, see Le Coupeur hats, 77–78; and atheist cosmology, 83; and grammar, 77; hatmaking (“chapellerie” column) 77–78, 81–83; history of, 81–83, see also Murger, Henri Hausmann, Georges-Eugène, 1 hawker’s cry, 155–156, 164, 170, 171 Helsinger, Elizabeth, 239n7, 241n28 Hemans, Felicia, 138, 185, 190 Herrick, John, 238n2 Hiddleston, J.A., 20, 34, 224n6, 226n34, 226–227n43 Highgate Penitentiary, 176, 235n10, 239n4 Hogarth, William, 99, 233n27 homosexuality, 6, 29, 239n4 Hood, Thomas: and Baudelaire, 5, 92, 103–105, 109–110; “Bridge of Sighs,” 107–108, 109, 110, 114, 129–131; and “Cordon Sanitaire,” 112; death of, 109; and Greenwell, Dora, 117–121; as humorist, 109; last word as, 220; as modern, 105; and Poe, 109–110, 112; and pun, 109, 112; Rossetti on, 129, 237n20, see also “Any Where Out of the World,” Furley, Mary, “La Corde” Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 149, 215–218, 240n7 Houssaye, Arsène, 63–64, 65, 67, 74–75, 76, 224n7, 234n52;

as poet, 86; as referenced by Greenwell, 119 Hudson, William Henry, 233n48 Hugo, Victor, 23, 24, 27, 28, 35, 38, 71, 95, 119, 211, 225, 229n13, 232n9 Hunt, William Holan, 99, 102, 233n27, 236n21 Huyssen, Andreas, 241n2 iamb, see under meter identity, 106, 127, 148; and collage material, 149; death as female, 127; and Eliot, T.S., 203; gendered, 175, 204, 207–208, 240n12; metrical, see under meter; national, 148, 174, 219; period, 207–208; prosodic, see under prosody; and secrets, 196; social, 148, 156, 176, 219; uncertainty of, 47, 176; vocalic, 148, see also rhythm, Woolf, Virginia Illustrated London News, 101 impersonality, 5, 6, 18, 143, 184, 191, 204 impurity, 41, 48, 64, 146 Ingres, Jean Auguste, 23 Innovateur, Moniteur des Cordonniers, L’, 69–70, 75, 85, 113 innovation, 1, 9, 16, 23, 123, 126, 151, 225; of Baudelaire and Rossetti compared, 147, 184; as modern v. Victorian, 179–183, 184, 204, 208; of newspapers, 67; women excluded from narratives of, 149, 179, 183, 204 irony, in Baudelaire’s verse, 38, 39, 48–49, 53; cross-Channel, 97–98, 110, 113, 119; and dead woman poems, 134; and journalism, 60, 62, 69, 73–74, 76, 79; in Murger, Henri, 80; and the prose poem, 10, 13,



250

20, 21, 39, 47–48, 53, 63, 85, 110–112; Rossetti as, 123, 124, see also under individual titles Jackson, Virginia, 183, 189 Jakobson, Roman, 13, 226n32 Jameson, Fredric, 2, 89–91, 231 Jauss, Hans Robert, 228 Johnson, Barbara, 20, 31, 53, 57, 79, 111, 226n42, 227n48 Jones, Kathleen, 97–98 Journalism, 53–87 passim, see also individual journal titles Kant, Immanuel, 10, 24, 94 Kaplan, Edward, 224 Keats, John, 146, 155, 236n21, 239n2, 240n7 Kenner, Hugh, 206 Kilmer, Joyce, 188 Kitsch, 90, 91 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 5 Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen, 222n16 Kopp, Robert, 94 Kreilkamp, Ivan, 1, 2, 4, 90 Laclos, Choderos de, 8 Landon, Leticia (L.E.L), 138–139 Lang, Andrew, 119 Language, 3, 8; “as such,” 184; and the dead, 132, 134, 135; delight at, 196; duplicity of, 16, 71, 134; and journalism, 70–71; 76–79; non-expressive modes of, 191, 197–201; purity of, 25, 70, 74, 98, 197; 200–201; registers of, 53, 54, 61–52, 68, 70, 166; rupture of, 50–51, 53, 59, 61–62, 68, 228; sensuality of, 135, 140, 153–154, 165, 172, 177, 191–194; and sexuality, 29, 64, 154, 155, 174–175; as snake, 63–64, see also absence, argot, English language,

251

French language, pun, translation Larceny, 94 Lautréamont (Lucien Ducasse), 8 Lawler, James, 224 Le Constitutionnel, 71 Leighton, Angela, 138–139 Leonardo da Vinci, 81 Lesbianism, 6, 216, 217, 222n17, 222n18 Linley, Margaret, 238n43 liquid: death, 108, 120, 130; expression as, 125, 172, 173, 17; and female sexuality, 108, 130; 167, 172–173, 185, 191, 209; fertility as, 173; flow, 185; juice, 132, 167; as juice, male, 175, 240n7; overflow, 125; rain, 44, 46, 139–140; 192–194; tears, 125, 133, 134, 167, 172, 192, 193; as upjut, 5; as water, 44; as weeping, 171, 172; weeping, male, 132–133, 134 women’s poetry as, 185, see also consonants, drowning Lloyd, Rosemary, 55, 225n10, 229n4 London, 2, 101, 108, 182; not referenced in Rossetti’s poetry, 124, 176; press, 130; street noise of, 2, 155; visited by Mallarmé, 218; as vulva, 5; Zoo, 146 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 93, 94 Lootens, Tricia, 126 Lowell, Amy, 181, 187 Loy, Mina, 182, 222n14 Maclean, Marie, 228n53, 230n22 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 184, 200–202, 203, 218, 241n2 Manet, Edouard, 110, 113, 114 Marcus, Sharon, 4, 96 Martin, Meredith, 240n7 Maupassant, Guy de, 181



GENER A L INDE X

GENER A L INDE X

Maxwell, Catherine, 125, 126, 133–134, 235–236n13, 236n21, 239n2 McGann, Jerome, 146, 186, 188 Menke, Richard, 239n4 meter, 17, 145–177 passim; accentual, 42, 155, 160, 162, 167, as transgressive, 163; as virginal, 163; alexandrine, 23, 41, 48, 73–74, 87, 147, 226; anapest, 121; and class, 146–147, 159–160; and collage, 149–151; common measure, 159, 162, 164; dactyl, 121, 155, 156, 158; and domesticity, 168–169, 173; English v. French, 42; iamb, 156, 161, 162–163, 167, 172, and prosodic nationalism, 147, 159; iambic pentameter, as English, 147 159, 162, 172; galloping rhythm, 151; “goblin” 147, 154–160, see also nursery rhyme; and Greenwell, Dora, 121; and Hood, Thomas, 121; hybrid, 41, 154, 167; and identity, 148, 154, 162; instability of, 146, 156, 159, 161–162; “maiden,” 160–165, 170; as material, 151; and nationalism, 42, 147, 158–159, 162; and play, 154; politics of, 148, 158–159, 240n28; semantics of, 147–148, 151; quantitative, 42, 172; Skeltonics, 158–160, 162, 167, 208, 241n21, see also Skelton, John; and translation, 42; and transgression, 42, 163; transnational, 42, 159–160; trochee, 159, 161, 162, 167, see also prosody Millais, John Everett, 99, 102, 129, 233n27, 237n23

Millet, Kate, 186 Milton, John, 94, 146, 155, 158, 217, 238n2 misogyny, Baudelaire’s, 6, 116; and modernism, 18, 191, 222n14, see also Sand, George Moi, Toril, 186 Moore, Marianne, 181, 187, 222n14 Morris, Jane, 128 Morris, William, 99 Mossop, D. J., 21, 224n3 Mukarovsky, 59, 125 Murger, Henri, 68, 73, 75, 79–80, 83–85, 231n37 Nerval, Gérard de, 119–120 New Criticism, 180, 186–191 New Monthly Magazine, 98 Nicholls, Peter, 241 Nixon, Judity, 218 Nord, Deborah, 235n5 nursery rhyme, 155–158; 159, 160; dactylic as suggesting, 156; as gendered, 157, 174; goblin chant as, 164–165, 171; as mercantile, 156, 239n7, 241n28; as native, 156; politics of, 241n28; as transnational, 157–158; as undervalued, 156 octosyllabic, 41 Ophelia, 128–129 Orientalism, 28–30, 96, 225–226 oysters, 174 parataxis, 121, 149, 151–152 Paris, 1, 30, 54, 69, 103; and journalism, 68, 70, 82, 83, 103; quais of, 104; as wilderness, see also crowds, flâneur Perloff, Marjorie, 149, 150 Petit Revue, Le, 104



252

phonetics, 152–154 Picasso, Pablo, 149 Pichois, Claude, 224n3, 233n40 Plagiarism, 94 Plath, Sylvia, 141 Playboy Magazine, 6 Poe, Edgar Allan, 1; Baudelaire’s love of, 6, 13, 75, 92–94; compared to Boileau, 225n17; and female death, 126, 128–129; as modern, 89; poetic theory of, 31–34, 42, 126; and the prose poem, 31–34, 49, 85; and pun, 76, 85, 109, 111–12, 115, 192; on Thomas Hood, 105, 109, 112; on translation, 103–104 poésie pure, see pure poetry, purity poetess, 3, 116, 119, 126, 128, 138, 183, 209, 238n43 Poet Mind, 142–143; 196, 203 Poggi, Christine, 149 politics, 6, 9, 17, 26, 64, 67, 72, 74, 213; emphasis on in recent criticism, 239; of English culture in France, 97, 99; of form, 148, 156–157, 184, 190, 214–215; French and Romanticism, 235; of metrical forms, 148, 184, 219, 241n28; of “Victorian,” 90–91; “Whig Aesthetic,” 188, 190; and women, 213, see also class, form, journalism, language, meter Poulet-Malassis, 104 Pound, Ezra, 5, 6, 7, 149, 150; and Ford, Ford Madox, 205–207; reception of Rossetti, 179, 180–181, 183, 203–205, 209, 210, 214, 222n17 Prendergast, Christopher, 112 Pre-Raphaelites, 5, 102, 103, 145, 148, 184, 205, 210, 211, 214, 231n2 see also individual painters

253

Presse, La, 55, 57, 63, 64, 66, 67, 74, 75, 86, 230n11 Prins, Yopie, 148, 183, 188, 239n6, 240n7, 242n4 progress, 54, 56, 71; metrical, 208 property, 95 prosody, English, 10, 42, 155, 159–160, 162–163, 170–172, 175; English and French compared, 10, 116, 121, 147, 225n13; English and French mixed, 42; French, 5, 10, 23, 41, 125, 149, 225n13; historical, 148–151; hybridity of, 42, 146, 160, 176; and identity, 158, 174–176; and materiality, 172; and nationalism, 147, 159–160; neoclassical, 10, 23, 125; as spiritual rule, 22 see also meter Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 95 Puccini, Giacamo, 79 pun, 71, 74–77, 109, 125, 139, 161, 193, 197, 218, 219; hidden, 76, 110, 111, 112, 115, 192; interlinguistic, 17, 105, 112, 114, 202; modernism as defined by, 179, 184; and Poe, 109–111 “pure hand,” 55–56, 60, 62 pure poetry, 16, 18, 33, 56, 62, 64, 79, 111, 184, 208; Rossettean and Baudelairean compared, 146, 219 purity, 3, 11 aesthetic, 21, 33, 35, 36, 40, 43, 47, 48, 50; death as purifying, 130, 132; linguistic, 25, 70, 74, 98, 200; national, 74, 94, 160; poetic, 16, 41, 74, 87, 94, 130, 160, 196; prosodic, 94, 159–160; rhetoric of, applied to Rossetti, 16, 146, 209, 213, 217; sexual, 74, see also pure hand, pure poetry



GENER A L INDE X

GENER A L INDE X

quarantine, 112, 114 Rachilde, 7 Racine, 98 Realism, 80, 85, 99, 101, 211, 227–228n52, 232n27, 233n30 religion, 25–26, 65, 83, 119, 141, 158, 176, 184, 207, 217, 218, 219 Revue Britannique, La, 97–99 Reynolds, Joshua, 99, 233n27 Reynolds, Margaret, 125, 133, 134 rhyme, 121, 125, 137, 145, 146, 151, 154, 158, 159, 161, 162, 167, 169, 173, 187, 208, 228n54, 237n36, see also nursery rhyme rhythm, and animals, 63, 165, 167; and beauty, 32–33, 37; and “le beau bizarre,” 29–30, 43; foreign v. native, 42, 94, 159–160, 165; galloping, 121; and identity, 148, 151, 161–163, 167, 170–171; and the prose poem, 34, 37, 41–42, 93; relation to truth and beauty, 32–33, 41; as semantic, 191–192, 198; as special characteristic of poetry, 32, see also “La Chambre double,” Guest, Edwin, meter, nursery rhyme, “A Scherzo,” “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”), meter Richards, I. A., 218 Richardson, James, 236n21, 237n36 Richardson, Samuel, 128, 133, 232n27 Rivière, Jacques, 2 Robb, Graham, 57, 75, 81, 229n9, 231n37, 231n39, 231n47 Romanticism, 8, 10, 23, 28, 39, 50, 92, 95, 98, 101, 125, 128, 138, 166, 211, 224n6, 225n15

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 142, 205, 210, 211, 215, 218, 232 Rossetti, William Michael, 129, 185, 217, 236n13 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 56 Rudy, Jason, 240n7 Ruff, Marcel, 226n37, 226n39 Ruskin, John, 89, 191, 210, 211, 213, 214 Sade, Donatien Alfonse François, Marquis de, 8 Saint-Alme, Lepoitevin, 71, 72–73 Saintsbury, George, 158, 159, 160, 208 Salines, Emily, 92–97 Sand, George, 99–100, 116, 223n19, 235n5 Sanyal, Debarati, 61–62, 225 Schor, Esther, 141 Scott, Clive, 227n48 Scott, Marcia, 110, 112 Scott, Walter, 119, 156, 157 sensuality, 11, 12, 25, 28, 39, 29, 44, 176, 197, 198, 203, 218 see also language sentiment/sentimentality, 5, 20, 25, 109, 121, 134, 138, 140, 142, 183, 187–190 Sexton, Anne, 141 Shakespeare, William, 128, 129, 146, 236–237n23 Shelley, Mary, 116, 186 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 102 shock, Benjaminian, 1, 8, 54, 66, 124; of the breeze, 124; compared with stealth, 7–9, 123–126, 142–143, 219; as defining modernism, 4–5; as gendered, 4–5, 7–8, 123; and “Goblin Market,” 18, 147; and journalism, 54, 66–68; “Le Mauvais Vitrier” as paradigm of, 10–13; lexical, 50; and the new, 24; as penetration, 7, 17, 50–51; poetics of, 5; as



254

GENER A L INDE X

156, 236n18, 237n25, see also corpse, death, drowning, fallen woman Suleiman, Susan, 8 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 3, 91, 94, 143, 149, 204, 216–218 tailoring, 17, 57, 75–84 temporality, and aesthetics, 19, 21, 30, 37–38, 44–50, 59, 106; 227n52; of composition, 145; confusion of, 167; and the dead, 136–137, 140; and desire, 199; and expressive theory, 25–26; and fashion, 50; as intrusion, 21, 46–47; and journalism, 62, 80; and modernity, 3–4, 62; obscured, 198, 200; and seasons, 193–194; for Baudelaire, see also “La Beauté,” La Chambre double,” “Hymne a la Beauté,” “La Soupe et les nuages,” “Peintre de la vie moderne”; for Rossetti, see also “At Home,” “A Pause for Thought,” “Song” Tennyson, Alfred, 8, 120, 129, 146; and Baudelaire, 5, 89, 93, 99, 101, 134, 146, 233n27; and female death, 123, 128, 133–134, 236n21; “Lotos-Eaters,” 94, 169–170; and male-authored tradition, 155, 169–170; 240n7, and Rossetti, 169–170; 192, 238–239n2, 241n32 Teukolsky, Rachel, 89–91; 221 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 99, 102 Theft, 94, 240n7 Tiffany, Daniel Newton, 232n3 Totorov, Tsvetan, 20 Transgression: aesthetics of, 23–31, 34; Baudelairean and Rossettean compared, 7–9, 16–18, 115, 123–126,



reaction to Poetics en passant, 215; and Rossetti, 17–18, 123–126, 147, 219; sexual, 17, 147; and sexuality, 7–8, 27–29; social, 17; syllabic, 147; urban, 54, 124; Wordsworthian, 215, see also “beau bizarre,” cutting, transgression, violation short story, 32–34, 47 Showalter, Elaine, 236n23 Siddal, Elizabeth, 127, 128, 129, 236n27 Silhouette, La, 70, 72–73 simile, 41, 43, 166, 168, 174, 227n48 Skelton, John, 145, 158, see also meter: Skeltonics Solaar, M. C., 53, 63 Solomon, Abraham, 237n25 sonnet, 24, 43–44, 106, 119, 133, 134–36, 146, 222n18, 241n30, see also individual poems Stallybrass, Peter, 9 stealth, 2, 6–7, 17–18, 123–127, 142–143; and Baudelaire, 95, 102, 115, 128; compared with shock, 7–9; and death, 126, 128, 131–136, 137; and gender, 7–8; and “hidden life,” 192–193; Maude as paradigm of, 14–16; as passing, 7, 15–17, 125–128, 134–137, 143, 184, 197–200, 215; and race, 7–8; and sexuality, 7–8, see also corpse, ghost, pun Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 189 Stein, Gertrude, 179 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 98 Stephens, Sonya, 63 Sterne, Lawrence, 94 Stevens, Wallace, 5 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1 suicide, of child, 58, 110, 113, see also “La Corde”; female, 106–108, 110, 129–131, 138,

255

GENER A L INDE X

Transgression—Continued 142–143, 219; and Baudelaire’s verse, 34–39, 49; and classicism, 10; as exotic, 27–29; of expressive poetics, 125–126; formal, 8–9, 31 of gender roles, 18, 29–31, 123–123, 127; innovation as, 2; as intergeneric; performance, 17, 50–51, 53; against Poe, 12, 31–34, 105; poetic, 2, 7, 163 and politics, 9, 26; prosodic, 141–143, 159–160, 163; and religion, 26; and Romanticism, 12, see also Victor Hugo; as self-violation, 17, 50, 53, 81; sexual, 7–9, 27–31, 90, 142; territorial model of, 4, 23–24, 27–29; tradition of, 8–9; translation as, 93–97, 101–102; as transnational, 57, 94, 101–102, 115; and women, 6 see also temporality, aesthetics, corpse, shock, stealth translation, 3, 5, 42–43, 90; and appropriation, 13, 42, 94–96; and Baudelaire, 5, 92–98, 104–105, 128, 224n6; as betrayal, 104–105; as creation, 42; English reproduced without, 101–102; and Greenwell, Dora, 119; and Mallarmé, 202; Poe on, 104–105; politics of, 94–96, 97–98 transnationalism, and Baudelaire, 6; between equal nations, 4, 96–97; and folk tradition, 158; Guys, Constantin as figure of, 101–102; as horizontal transgression, 57; as implying power differential, 4, 96; metrical, 41–43; the modern as, 102; and transgression, 94, see also, Guest, Edwin Tucker, Herbert F., 239n4

Understanding Poetry, 185–189 Valette, Marguerite Eymery, see Rachilde Vejvoda, Kathleen, 238n2 Victoria, Queen, 3, 90, 101 Victorian Poetry, 1 Victorian Studies, 4 violation, 48, 50, 64, 87, 94, 146 Violence: aesthetic, 13, 31, 46, 58, 81, 86, 114; against children, see Thomas Hood, “La Corde”; against the poor, 114; against the quotidian, 86; against women, 61–62, 131, 128, 174; and form and, 61–62; and journalism, 55–56, 62, 65, 70, 105; and language, 60, 62, 64, 70, 105, 114, 147; metrical, 146, 147, 155; and poetry, 13, 20, 60–62, 81, 86, 114; of quotidian, 59–60; and Rossetti, 10, 17, 86, 146–147, 174, 184, see also “Goblin Market”; sexual violence, 128, 174 see also “beau bizarre,” corpse, cutting, “Mauvais Vitrier” voice, 58, 59, 86, 119, 123, 126, 140–141; bodily voice, 154; and consonants, 152–153; poetic voice, 140–141, 153; multiple voices, 146, 150, 158; of the dead, 123 Voloshinov, Valentin, 90 Voltaire, 31 Warren, Austin, 186, see also Understanding Poetry Warren, Robert Penn, 185 Watts, Frederick, 237n25 Wellek, Réné, 186 Weschser, Herta, 240n10 “Whig Aesthetic,” 188, 190 White, Allon, see Stallybrass, Peter Wilde, Oscar, 8



256

Wing, Nathaniel, 28, 64 Winkelmann, 27 Wolff, Janet, 235n5 Wolfreys, Julian, 127 Women, see corpse, dead woman, death, fallen women, gender, individual names, misogyny, modernism, poetess, transgression, violence, writing Wordsworth, William, 125, 155, 215, 225 Woolf, Virginia, 180, 183, 204, 207–210, 212, 214;

257

writing, -book, Maude’s, 14, 15, 150, 157, 175, 190, 213; as escape from social confinement, 14–16, 121; as fall, 60; handwriting, 14, 56, 150, 175; material conditions of, 14, 75, 118, 150; and silence and, 14–18, 118; and stealth, 14–16; and weaving, 120; women’s, 6, 15, 150, 180, 186, 209, 210, see also commerce, journalism Yeats, William Butler, 206



GENER A L INDE X




TO

I N D I V I DUA L WO R K S

BY

C H A R L E S B AU D E L A I R E A N D CHR IST I NA ROSSET T I

Baudelaire, Charles individual works A une passante, 17, 103 Any Where Out of the World, 19, 53, 92, 94, 104–105, 108–109, 129 Assommons les pauvres, 20 Au Lecteur, 223 Aveugles, Les, 224

Gateau, Le, 114 Gouffre, Le, 223n25 Guignon, Le, 94 L’Héautontimouroménos, 51 Hymne à la Beauté, 21, 34, 36–39, 44, 48, 50, 226n39, 226n40 Joueur Généreux, Le, 94 La Fanfarlo, 31, 224

Beauté, La, 21, 34–36, 37, 38–39, 43–44, 48, 106, 146, 226n37 Bons Chiens, Les, 94 Carnet, 64–65, 94, 109 Chambre double, La, 14, 20, 21, 34, 39–51, 53, 58, 60, 64, 69, 73, 94, 228n52, 230n11 Chevelure, La, 20 Corde, La, 20, 58, 75, 86, 92, 110–115, Cygne, Le, 30, 223

Mademoiselle Bistouri, 20 Masque, Le, 223 Mon coeur mis à nu, 55–56, 60–61, 94, 99, Mort des amants, La, 231 Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, 31–33, 47–48, 49, 94, 227n47, 233n27 Notice sure Pierre Dupont, 67, 230n28

Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses oeuvres, 94 Exposition Universelle de 1855, L’ 22, 22–31, 34, 39, 43, 50, 83, 99, 228n52

Pause for Thought, A, 198–201, 202 Peintre de la vie moderne, 62, 101, 103, 226n40, 233n27 Petites Vieilles, Les, 223n25 Puisque réalisme il y a, 99–100, 232n27

Flacon, Le, 224n6, 229n1 Flambeau vivant, Le, 94 Fusées, 54, 94

Salon de 1844, 227n52 Salon de 1859, 22, 102, 227n52, 232–233n27, 233n47

Du vin et du hachisch, 31, 224, 226



I N DE X

260

INDE X

TO

I N DI V I DUA L WOR K S

Soupe et les nuages, La, 14, 58–62, 70, 230n11 Spleen II, 227n47

Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children, 193

Vampire, Le, 223n25 Voyage, Le, 54 Rossetti, Christina Georgina individual works After Death, 124, 132–134, 135, 136, 141, 146, 235n9, 236n21 Another Spring, 197–198 At Home, 124, 135–137, 191–192 Convent Threshold, The, 217, 237 “Goblin Market,” 10, 15, 17, 86, 145–177 passim Goblin Market and Other Poems (collection), 3, 9, 17, 123, 124, 134, 143, 153, 183, 184, 191, 202, 203, 217

Maude, 14–16, 145, 148, 150, 157, 158, 172, 175, 176, 177, 190, 213, 236n15, 238n43; and collage, 150, 175; and “compound,” 15, 150, 157, 172, 175; and identity, 15, 148, 158, 172, 175, 190; and parlor games, 145; and religion, 176; and women’s pastimes, 150 May, 197–198, 201 Sing-Song, 157 Song (When I am dead my dearest . . .), 123–124, 131, 139, 179–214 Speaking Likenesses, 157 Spring, 191–193, 201 Triad, A, 241 Winter: My Secret, 134, 194–195, 198, 201–202



Lowest Room, The, 190, 213 Un Hémisphère dans une chevelure, 20, 53, 79 Une Charogne, 56 Une Martyre, 56, 61, 68

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