London: Capital of the Nineteenth Century

That Charles Baudelaire is a modern poet is one of the most comfortably established claims in literary studies, supported by a dauntingly illustrious group of poets and critics beginning in Baudelaire's time and continuing up to our own. Paul Verlaine said that Baudelaire represented "l'homme moderne."¹ T. S. Eliot praised him for introducing "something universal in modern life." Marshall Berman calls him the "first modernist," and Jonathan Culler the "prophet of modernity."² There are other characterizations of Baudelaire, to be sure, but none has the stature of this one: Baudelaire the modern poet, or, just as often, Baudelaire the first modern poet.³

Of course, if writers as politically and philosophically diverse as T. S. Eliot and Marshall Berman can be said to agree about Baudelaire's status as a modern poet, it may be because they are using the word "modern" in very different ways—rather as if we were to say that Tony Blair's commitment to labor was the same as Clement Attlee's, or Edmund Burke's conservatism the same as George W. Bush's. Ultimately, though, I don't think this is true in the case of Baudelaire. When Eliot invokes the idea of the modern, he certainly means something different from Berman, but not something so very different as to rule out any common ground. As applied to Baudelaire, the word modern has a fairly consistent set of meanings: Baudelaire is modern because his poetry reflects either the conditions of urban industrialism (cities, slums, commodities, crowds) or, alternately, the trauma of living in an urban, industrial landscape (shock, alienation, reification). These are two sides of the same coin, one the material, the other the psychic impact of a new stage of capitalism, and what makes Baudelaire's poetry modern, for all of these critics, is its engagement with one or both of these two sides.

If all of this is true, though, we need to ask why the first modern poet should have been a French poet. Urban, industrial capitalism did not, after all, begin in France. England was the first nation to cross the industrial divide, and English poets faced the mixed pain and promise of industrialism earlier than their French counterparts, often in more insistent and more pervasive forms. If the first modern poet appeared in France, and if the conditions that made him modern had already existed in England for half a century, then that poet must have had a rather complicated relationship to English industry and English literature. In fact, I hope to show that Baudelaire's attention to English life sharpened his representation of the modern, and that his engagement with English poetry expanded the range of his own verse (his relation to Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and American poetry is caught up in this as well, often in ways that make the "American" hard to distinguish from the "British"). Ultimately, if we want to better understand what made Baudelaire modern, we have to pay greater attention to his Englishness—and this means both the way he related to English literature and the way English readers recognized themselves in Les fleurs du mal. It is not only Paris that stands at the heart of Baudelaire's modern poetry, it is also London, that other capital of the nineteenth century.

The Crystal Palace Project

The strong association of Paris with modernity, and of Baudelaire with both, draws a good deal of its force from the work of the German philosopher and social critic Walter Benjamin. It was Benjamin who gave us the first, richest, and most detailed account of Baudelaire as the poet of modern life, and it was likewise Benjamin who made Paris the unofficial capital of the nineteenth century. As a result, it is tempting to think that these two parts of his account belong together, that everything we need to know about what made Baudelaire modern can be found in Paris. But in fact England, more than France, was the real locus of industrial capitalism, and London a rival claimant to the title "Capital of the Nineteenth Century." It...