New York-Paris: Whitman, Baudelaire, and the Hybrid City

Notes

Notes introduction 1. W. T. Bandy, “Whitman and Baudelaire,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1.3 (1983) 55. 2. Ibid., 53. This quotation from Baudelaire is in an essay entitled “Poetry of the Future,” which appeared in the North American Review in February 1881. Whitman is arguing that American poets “labor under subordination of spirit, a lack of the concrete, and that modern aesthetic contagion . . . called the beauty disease.” 3. James Woodress, ed., Critical Essays on Walt Whitman (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983) 42. The review was published in the London Critic of April 1856. 4. See Petits poèmes en prose, ed. Robert Kopp (Paris: José Corti, 1968) lxiii. The review appeared in Le Figaro, February 7, 1864. In July 1857, the same critic from Le Figaro had published a vitriolic review of Les Fleurs du mal, in which he stigmatized the poems for their immorality. As a consequence, Baudelaire was sued by the government for offense to public and religious morals. 5. The Nation and Atheneum, December 18, 1926, 426. 6. See for instance David Weimer, The City as Metaphor (New York: Random House, 1966); K. Versluys, The Poet in the City (Tübingen: G. Narr Verlag, 1987) 52–55; and, for a more nuanced comparison, William C. Sharpe, Unreal Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990) 72–75. 7. “Edgar Poe, sa vie, ses œuvres.” In Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 1975–76) 2:299. Subsequently referred to as OC followed by volume and page number. 8. “L’art philosophique,” OC, 2:603. See Philippe Roger, The American Enemy : A Story of French Anti-Americanism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005) 59–63. 9. Roger Asselineau, “When Walt Whitman Was a Parisian,” Mickle Street Review 9.2 (1988) 30. 10. “France the 18th Year of these States.” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: Norton, 2002) 198. All textual references to Leaves of Grass will be to this edition, an expanded and revised version of the 1973 Norton edition by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. Abbreviated as LG followed by page number. 111 11. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 3 (1913; New York: Rowman and Little‹eld, 1961) 35. 12. “Mon coeur mis à nu,” OC, 1:686–87. 13. Walter Benjamin, “Zentralpark,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann , vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982) 682. Translation mine. In the immense set of notes known as The Arcades Project, Benjamin formulates the same thought word for word, but without the concluding question concerning Whitman (Arcades, J 66 a, 1). See Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. R. Tiedemann, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980); in English, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). 14. Félix Nadar, Charles Baudelaire intime (1911; Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes /La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1994) 36–37. Paraphrase mine. See also W. T. Bandy and Claude Pichois, Baudelaire devant ses contemporains (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1957) 15–34; and Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 248, 253, 259 (J11a, 2; J 14a, 2; J17, 6). 15. Including the Fulton Ferry Landing in Lower Manhattan. 16. “Préface des Fleurs,” OC, 1:181. 17. See J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1998) 232. 18. “L’oeuvre et la vie de Delacroix,” OC, 2:751. 19. Tout bon poète fut toujours réaliste. “Puisque réalisme il y a,” OC, 2:58. 20. See LG, 784. 21. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960) 192. 22. “De l’héroïsme de la vie moderne.” OC, 2:496. 23. See Jules Laforgue, Mélanges posthumes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1903) 113. On Laforgue and Whitman, see Betsy Erkkila, Walt Whitman among the French: Poet and Myth (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980) 69–77. Had Laforgue published a complete translation of Leaves of Grass, he “would then have performed the same function for Whitman in France as Baudelaire had earlier performed for Edgar Poe” (Erkkila, 70). 24. Lucy Fountain, “Charles Pierre Baudelaire,” Lippincott’s Magazine 8 (October 1871) 384. 25. Eugene Benson, “Charles Baudelaire, Poet of the Malign,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1869, 172. From an American point of view, Whitman was perceived as reacting against what Ann Douglas has termed “the feminization of American culture.” Leaves of Grass was avowedly written for “a great composite Democratic Individual, male or female” (preface...