From “The Raven” to “Le Cygne”: Birds, Transcendence, and the Uncanny in Poe and Baudelaire

Abstract

Birds are centrally emblematic in both Baudelaire’s and Poe’s work. During his lifetime Poe was already known as “the author of ‘The Raven’” (this poem was the only one of Poe’s poems Baudelaire translated [or rather, paraphrased, in prose], making it the focus for subsequent French readers); while Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros” and especially “Le Cygne” encapsulate both his own position as an artist and a wider alienation within, and from, modernity. Taking as its point of contrast the traditional, beatific connotations of birds in the poets’ predecessors and contemporaries, this article seeks to situate the specificity of avian images in Poe and Baudelaire, placing these images within the dualism of presence and absence, plenitude and abjection, relativity and transcendence central to both authors.

This article explores one of the most suggestive figures in nineteenth-century English-language and French poetry: birds.¹ Taking as its departure point the two most celebrated bird poems by Poe and Baudelaire, it sets them against the wider context of the poetic evocation of birds by these writers and their contemporaries, arguing that the dualistic nature of birds as actual creatures and symbols of transcendence, denizens of the earth and of the air, highlights peculiarly acutely a dichotomy of presence and absence, the known, familiar, and what is made unfamiliar, “uncanny.” This tension between known and unknown, and vice versa, is central both to the (exclusively virtual, literary) relationship between Baudelaire and Poe, but also to the dichotomy of adhésion, identification, on the one hand, and, on the other, distance, which characterizes both this relationship and, more broadly, our attitude to and place within the phenomenal world. As the last part of the article argues, it is the poetry of Mallarmé which most intimately hints at the potential present in embryo in Poe and Baudelaire.

Baudelaire recounts his first encounter with the works of Poe as a kind of mesmeric revelation:

En 1846 ou 47, j’eus connaissance de quelques fragments d’Edgar Poe; j’éprouvai une commotion singulière; ses œuvres complètes n’ayant été rassemblées qu’après sa mort en une édition unique, j’eus la patience de me lier avec des Américains vivant à Paris pour leur emprunter des collections de journaux qui avaient été dirigés par Poe. Et alors je trouvai, croyez-moi, si vous voulez, des poèmes et des nouvelles dont j’avais eu la pensée, mais vague et confuse, mal ordonnée, et que Poe avait su combiner et mener à la perfection.²

In 1846 or ’47, I took cognizance of some pieces by Edgar Poe; I experienced a singular shock; his complete works having gathered together in a single edition only after his death, I patiently formed bonds with Americans living in Paris in order to borrow collections of newspapers of which Poe had been the editor. And then I found, if you can believe it, poems and novellas of which I had had, if you like, the idea, but in a vague, confused and disordered way, and which Poe had been able to contrive and bring to perfection.

By this extraordinary retrospective account, Poe had produced perfected versions of the works Baudelaire had but imagined, almost before Baudelaire had even thought of them. Poe here appears as a kind of fantasy aesthetic parent or progenitor, a sort of literary elder brother able to guide Baudelaire in his particular creative path. More important than the works,³ however, was perhaps that the discovery gave Baudelaire, via Griswold’s depreciation of Poe as a hard-drinking, disreputable outsider: written confirmation and transatlantic approval of the questionable, marginal identity which Baudelaire had long wanted but had not dared acknowledge as his own.⁴

The figure of mirroring, recognition, analogue, is thus at the center of the relationship between the two. For Baudelaire, Poe was a double, a brother, a soul mate, yet also a stranger, familiar (“bekannt”), and yet unknown. The two never corresponded or...