Material Inscriptions: Charles Baudelaire and the Poetry of the Modern World

AbstractAs early as 1924, Paul Valéry suggested that we might think of Baudelaire as not only the poet of the modern world but also one of the key figures in a world literature of modernity. This chapter, on the one hand, seeks to outline the problematics and ambivalence of the question of modernity for Baudelaire and, on the other, proposes to think of poetic form as the core site where the modern world occurs or is produced in Baudelaire's work. It is at the level of poetic form that Baudelaire's work perhaps most fully engages with its world and historical situation.