First-Rate Blasphemy

Abstract When T. S. Eliot first discovered Baudelaire and the Symbolists in 1907-8, he found assurance that in French symbolist poetry there existed a truly “modern” poetic language and that there were similar unexplored possibilities of language and imagery in English poetry. The aesthetic presence of Baudelaire is evident throughout Eliot’s early poetry, but when he returned to a fuller study of Baudelaire’s poetry and prose in 1919 his interest had clearly shifted to the moral and spiritual plane. Underlying the Baudelairean imagery and allusions in The waste Land is Eliot’s deeper and more pervasive interest in Baudelaire as a wasteland “saint,” as the first desert father of the reaction against romanticism, and in the early 1920s Baudelaire succeeded even Dante as the central figure through whom Eliot defined the spiritual difficulties and moral responsibilities of the modern poet.