Charles Baudelaire Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jonathan Monroe

Critical Essay by Jonathan Monroe

SOURCE: "Baudelaire's Poor: The Petitis poèmes en prose and the Social Reinscription of the Lyric," in A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre, Cornell, 1987, pp. 93-124.

Monroe is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he maintains that economic and social concerns motivated Baudelaire's use of the prose poem.

Baudelaire and Women:

[Passionate] clinging to his maternal apron-strings crippled Baudelaire's sexuality. Contempt made him, it seems, impotent: in his poetry he is left, supremely, a voyeur. The ideals of mutual or procreative love held no allure for him: he felt only a sado-masochistic struggle 'in which one of the players must lose their self-control' [Joanna Richardson, Baudelaire, 1994]. Hence his long devotion to the octoroon Jeanne Duval, the démon sans pitié who bled him dry and damned him black; hence his long devotion to Apollonie Sabatier, the untouchable Vénus blanche and redeeming Madonna. Beneath the...
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