Baudelaire poète latin

Abstract

Like Rimbaud and Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire excelled in the study of Latin poetry when he was at school. It is nonetheless legitimate to ask how much this allows us to better understand the radically new aesthetics he advocated. Baudelaire articulated original ideas about the role of the Latin language in French poetry and engagea in aesthetic reflection about the relationship between the Latin poetry of the decadent period and literary modernity. Furthermore, the poet believed that there was a mysterious, even mystical affinity between the Latin and French languages. Underlying the intertextuality and rewriting that mark Baudelairian verse, and give it its present/absent Latinity, is a constantly renewed process of reflection about the stylistic influences proper to the «lieu commun». Baudelaire's poetry tends to impose Latin upon the French to such a degree that this internal tension becomes central to the meaning, the oblique inscription of the Latinity revealing both the ontological power of the Word and its limits. It is as if the writing is constantly pointing to an «ailleurs» that emblematizes the diffuse and anamorphic presence of Latin in the text. This deliberate use of poetic practice mirrors a shattered reality, whose reflection is an empty transcendence that the poet at the same time denies. Baudelaire's Latin poetics is the linguistic projection of an ontology that is inseparable front hermeneutics.