Le Spleen de Paris
Baudelaire mentions he had read Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la nuit (considered the first example of prose poetry) at least twenty times before starting this work.
The point of the poems is "to capture the beauty of life in the modern city," using what Jean-Paul Sartre has labeled his existential outlook on his surroundings.
Published twenty years after the fratricidal June Days that ended the ideal or "brotherly" revolution of 1848, Baudelaire makes no attempts at trying to reform society he has grown up in but realizes the inequities of the progressing modernization of Paris.
The title of the work refers not to the abdominal organ (the spleen) but rather to the second, more literary meaning of the word, "melancholy with no apparent cause, characterised by a disgust with everything".
Many of the poems refer to sex or sin explicitly (i.e. "Double Bedroom," "A Hemisphere in a Head of Hair", "Temptations"); others use subtle language and imagery to evoke sensuality (i.e. "the Artist's Confiteor").
In both cases, the diction is undeniably sexual; for example, in "Double Bedroom", "Muslin rains abundantly over the windows and around the bed in a snowy cascade.
For Baudelaire, the setting of most poems within Le Spleen de Paris is the Parisian metropolis, specifically the poorer areas within the city.
[10] Many poems in Le Spleen de Paris incorporate a central theme of religion or the relationship between good and evil in human nature.
"Cake", which centers on a moral battle addressing the question of whether humans are inherently good or evil stands out as an especially important poem within the collection.
"Loss of a Halo" also incorporates similar themes, literally discussing the role of angels as well as the relationship between mankind and religious ideology, questioning the goodness of Christian ideals.
[12] One can extrapolate this poem to apply more figuratively to the larger themes of the poet-reader relationship, in which Baudelaire deprecates his readers, viewing them as unintelligent and incapable of appreciating his work.
[13] In the preface to Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire describes that modernity requires a new language, "a miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough and striking enough to suit lyrical movements of the soul, undulations of reverie, the flip-flops of consciousness", and in this sense, Le Spleen de Paris gives life to modern language.
[14] Baudelaire's prose poetry tends to be more poetic in comparison to later works such as Ponge's Le parti pris des choses, but each poem varies.
These poems aimed at capturing the times in which they were written, from the brutally repressed upheavals of 1848 (after which the government censored literature more than ever), the 1851 coup d'état of Louis Bonaparte and generally Paris of the 1850s, demolished and renovated by Napoleon III's prefect, Baron Haussman.
Moreover, 'The Imp of the Perverse (short story)' is less a tale than a prose poem, and both its subject-matter and its movement from general considerations to specific examples leading to an unexpected conclusion may have influenced Baudelaire in his creation of Le Spleen de Paris."
Aloysius Betrand's Gaspard de la nuit: Baudelaire himself is quoted as citing this work as an inspiration for Paris Spleen.
Critical reception: The way in which the poem was received certainly lends to understanding the climate in which Baudelaire created Le Spleen de Paris, in that "It appears to be almost a diary entry, an explicit rundown of the day's events; those events seem to be precisely the kind that Charles Baudelaire would have experienced in the hectic and hypocritical world of the literary marketplace of his day."
Notable critical reception: In order to truly understand how Le Spleen de Paris was received, one must first be acquainted with Baudelaire's earlier works.
The repressions and upheavals of 1848 resulted in massive censorship of literature, which did not bode well for Baudelaire's perhaps most famous work, Les Fleurs du Mal.
Like Flowers of Evil, it wasn't until much later that Paris Spleen was fully appreciated for what it was, a masterpiece that "brought the style of the prose poem to the broader republics of the people".
Appearance in Media: A 2006 film Spleen, written by Eric Bomba-Ire, borrowed its title from Baudelaire's book of prose poems.
Baudelaire expressed a particular feeling that he called 'Spleen' which is a mixture of melancholy, rage, eros, and resignation, which ties in well with the movie's darkly woven tale of love, betrayal and passion.
In "The Bad Windowpane Maker" Baudelaire speaks of a "kind of energy that springs from ennui and reverie" that manifests itself in a particularly unexpected way in the most inactive dreamers.
