Baudelaire and the Poetics of Pollution

Abstract

Examining how key aspects of Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory address the negative ramifications of industrial growth, this article traces the black smoke that drifts through his urban poems in the context of the increasing visibility and public concern over air pollution in the second half of the nineteenth century. Reading his ‘recycled’ 1862 version of the prose poem ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’ (Le Spleen de Paris), a sombre poem in its first version from 1855 that stands apart from the rhapsodic rhetoric in contemporary literature lauding the capabilities of steam and machines, it situates Baudelaire as deploying a remedying aesthetics of conservation that aims to depollute. The noticeable clearing away of contamination in the revised poem, with its suggestion of light and airiness as well as its fluid sketch quality, lets breathe the dispersed fragments of nature engulfed by, but still palpitating beneath, the unrelenting and interlocked forces of urbanization and industrialization.