8 Baudelaire: Life and the Production of Poetry

Abstract The chapter explores Baudelaire's biographical portraits of other writers, especially Poe and Gautier, in which he revises the contemporary view that the poet's work simply reflects his life. Instead, he presents the writer's life as deliberately geared to the creation of the work. Baudelaire's view of poetry as a production that takes place in a lived context is reflected in the biographical structure of Les Fleurs du mal in which a poet goes from birth to death. The volume repeatedly stages scenes of poetic creativity, or of its absence, in which the poetry explores the tensions between different models of poetic creation: technical skill and inward predisposition, and thus pushes poetry itself to a kind of crisis. The life is presented as the condition under which prosodic mastery may be achieved, and its results enjoyed, though often at a price.