Decanting the Rabelaisian Casks: Accessing Neoplatonic Poetic Fury in Baudelaire's ‘L'Âme du vin’

Abstract

In one of the lesser-studied sections of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, ‘Le Vin’, the poet offers a key to understanding the transcendence necessary for common post-Revolution Parisians to attain the proper poetic inspiration to create elevated verse. Divine or poetic Fury, a theoretically more robust version of other nineteenth-century ideas of intoxication, is at the heart of the section's threshold poem, ‘L'Âme du vin’, and establishes a bridge in Les Fleurs du mal linking the modern terrestrial wanderings of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ to the celestial flights of the ‘Fleurs du mal’. Developed from Plato's Ion and Gallically codified by Rabelais, these theories filter to the aesthete Baudelaire, who decants this aged wine into a nineteenth-century vessel that lays old regime vertical hierarchies on their side and offers poetic intoxication to all who are willing to labour to become vessels of inspiration themselves.