A book newly acquired by the Thammasat University Library should be useful for students interested in literature, France, European history, poetry, and related subjects.
Late Fragments: Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed is by the French poet Charles Baudelaire.
The TU Library collection also includes several other books by and about Baudelaire.
The book gathers poems and prose fragments about, among other things, an unhappy stay in Belgium.
Baudelaire was a powerful poet who had an unhappy life, in part due to ill health that was not improved by drug abuse.
He also had money worries all his life, and was dependent on his mother for financial support even as an adult.
In French literature, Baudelaire did much to advance understanding of English language writers by his translations of Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas De Quincey.
He also wrote a great deal about art and the city of Paris, inspiring later authors such as the essayist Walter Benjamin.
The art historian Anita Brookner wrote of Baudelaire:
The imagination eulogized by Baudelaire is in his own case more often than not a synonym for desire or despair. His critical exigencies are, like those of the profoundly sick man that he was, harsh and imperative and illusory in the sense of release temporarily obtained. Yet imagination is also the faculty that gives Baudelaire a royal sense of equality with other creative artists; he uses his status as a poet to boost his activities as a critic, claiming, with total justification in his case, that criticism is a creative affair, a fine rather than applied art.
The translator Michael Hamburger observed about Baudelaire:
Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty.
Here are some thoughts by Baudelaire from books, some of which are in the TU Library collection:
There is in a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery. […]
All great poets become naturally, fatally, critics. […]
An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty — a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.
- Romantic Art (1869)
God is the only being who need not even exist in order to reign.
Whatever is created by the spirit is more alive than matter.
What is intoxicating about bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of offensiveness.
- Rockets (1867)
For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
Perhaps it would be sweet to be, in turn, both victim and executioner.
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. As it turns out, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
One can only forget about time by making use of it.
- Intimate Diaries (1864–1867)
Genius is only childhood recovered at will, childhood now gifted to express itself with the faculties of manhood and with the analytic mind that allows him to give order to the heap of unwittingly hoarded material. […]
Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable. […]
Certainly this man, such as I have described him, this loner who is gifted with an active imagination, traversing forever the vast desert of men, has a loftier aim than that of a simple idler, an aim more general than the passing pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for what one might be allowed to call modernity; for no better word presents itself to express the idea in question. What concerns him is to release the poetry of fashion from its historical trappings, to draw the eternal out of the transient. […]
Evil happens without effort, naturally, inevitably; good is always the product of skill.
- The Painter of Modern Life (1863)
Which one of us has not dreamed, on ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose: musical, without rhythm or rhyme; adaptable enough and discordant enough to conform to the lyrical movements of the soul, the waves of revery, the jolts of consciousness?
Above all else, it is residence in the teeming cities, it is the crossroads of numberless relations that gives birth to this obsessional ideal. […]
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being defeated. […]
What good is it to accomplish projects, when the project itself is enjoyment enough? […]
To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity. […]
The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist. […]
This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.
- Paris Melancholy (1862)
I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on,
The windows and the stars illumined, one by one,
The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily,
And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see
The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass;
And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight.
- Flowers of Evil (1857)
It is imagination that has taught man the moral sense of color, of contour, of sound and of scent. It created, in the beginning of the world, analogy and metaphor. It disassembles creation, and with materials gathered and arranged by rules whose origin is only to be found in the very depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of the new. As it has created the world (this can be said, I believe, even in the religious sense), it is just that it should govern it. […]
Without her, all the faculties, sound and acute though they may be, seem nonexistent; whereas the weakness of some secondary faculties is a minor misfortune if stimulated by a vigorous imagination. None of them could do without her, and she is able to compensate for some of the others. Often what they look for, finding it only after a series of attempts by several methods not adapted to the nature of things, she intuits, proudly and simply. Lastly, she plays a role even in morality; for, allow me to go so far as to say, what is virtue without imagination?
- The 1859 Paris Salon Exhibit
(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)