The Poet and the City

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the role of the poet in ‘Tableaux parisiens’, where he appears as a conflicted flâneur oscillating between engagement and withdrawal, creative energy and sorry passivity. Here again is the poet as double agent: the mind’s eye seemingly catching random sight of the bizarre, and the artist constructing his dreamscapes with knowing craft. The traditional vatic seer has become the urban sightseer, caught in a dialectic of seeing and being seen, of solitude and solidarity. He is also the poet as painter of modern life, transforming ‘le Mal’ into verse tableaux: tableaux as visual descriptions, as frozen theatrical moments, as successive, proto-cinematic frames, and as prosodic displays in which disruption and fragmentation are recuperated within a new poetry of chaos. In ‘Tableaux parisiens’, as in Le Spleen de Paris, the poet confronts the challenge of reconciling the legislations of harmony with the lawlessness of life’s mess.