An Aesthetics of Movement: Baudelaire, Poetic Renewal, and the Invitation of Dance

In a letter written to Arsène Houssaye, which appears in its finished form as the liminal "Lettre-Dédicace" to his Petits Poëmes en prose (1862), Charles Baudelaire speaks in the name of a poetics and of an aesthetics born of an increasingly mobile modernity. Specifically, he declares his dream of a "prose poétique," which he describes in terms that draw attention to the mind's movement. He asks: "Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas, dans ses jours d'ambition, rêvé le miracle d'une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l'âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience?" (146).¹ The attentive reader cannot help but notice the importance Baudelaire places on movement relative to poetic thought and prose. Moreover, he articulates movement through the vocabulary of dance. We notice, for example, that he describes consciousness as interlacing figures forming "innombrables rapports," which suggest the ephemeral patterns a spectator would see emerging and dissolving on a ballroom floor. According to this vision, the reverie of the poet-spectator is punctuated by experiences of undulating movement and small, abrupt leaps or soubresauts. It is as if the poet were defining the contours of a modern poetics in which danced movement would play a central role. Indeed, his discussion of movement in the liminal "Lettre-Dédicace" amplifies this impression.

To be sure, the Baudelairean motif of dance, expressed both figuratively and as rhythmic movement, recurs in a number of the poet's writings. We encounter it overtly in, for example, the verse poems "Le Serpent qui danse" and "Harmonie du soir" of Spleen et Idéal (1857), and in "Danse macabre" of the Tableaux parisiens (1859). Similarly, allusions to dance play a significant role in the essay "Les Paradis Artificiels" (1853), in the prose poem "Le Thyrse" (1863), and in several of Baudelaire's posthumously published Fusées. In each instance, the poet refers to dance both in relation to the experience of poetic thought and as a kind of embodied poetry. To apply Francisco Varela's definition of embodiment to the present analysis, it appears that Baudelaire seeks to enact a union between mind and body in the poem and through poetic use of danced rhythms and movement, as I shall show (Varela 27). Despite the recurrence of dance in his writings, Baudelaire's interest in this art form and his use of it as a source of poetic invention have received relatively little scholarly attention in recent years. In the following analysis, I shall examine Baudelaire's poetic engagement with dance in a selection of poetic and critical writings, in view of identifying its relationship to the poet's poetics and aesthetic vision. To frame my discussion, I propose to respond to the following questions: What role does dance play in Baudelaire's poetic and aesthetic writings and how do allusions to dance serve to articulate the poet's ideal of "le miracle d'une prose poétique"? Does the dance motif evolve in his poetry and is the rhythmic effect of dance-related imagery distinguishable from the often-remarked effect of bercement that Baudelaire cultivates in his poems? How do dance motifs correspond to Baudelairean notions of poetic thought and to experiential or embodied poetic reflection? And finally, what are the historical and cultural phenomena that may offer insight into Baudelaire's elaboration of the dance motif, both with respect to the emergence of the modern city and with respect to dance history? I shall turn first to the encroaching context of modernity and mobility in which Baudelaire was writing.

Modern Mobility and Lyric Movement

Without a doubt, Baudelaire lived during a time that bore witness to accelerated change. Moreover, this inveterate Parisian belonged to the urban landscape of Paris, whose residents experienced change, both physical and perceptual, in a concentrated way. To name only a few of the inventions that gradually came to punctuate the pace of Parisian life during...