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L'Esprit Créateur though elegantly concise, and inevitably cogent, "linear" reading of the 127 poems of the 1861 2nd edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. As Lawler's title indicates, if "secret architecture" there is, as Barbey d'Aurevilly intuited long ago, then it is certainly dialectical, riven, fraught with tension and paradox and irony: a "quarreling" with self that proceeds "by constant negations." No triumph is available, as Lawler rightly appreciates; neither "ideal life" nor "earthly life" prevails -and it is precisely this ceaseless and avowed tussle of "presence" and "image" that draws forth Bonnefoy's own admiration, where a univocal aesthetics and ethics of purity and transcendence , beauty and order, repose and self-sufficiency might have definitively repulsed the author of Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve. A given poem or group of poems thus always constitutes a "poet(h)ical" microcosm neither capable of affirming imaginative ascendancy nor yet willing to be subsumed or perfectly synthesized via other "microcosmic" text(s). Yet, as Lawler deftly argues, no stymying or stagnation occurs. Les Fleurs du Mal is not a book of blockage, impasse, seething aporia. It is a book of contrasts , of opening to option, choice, freedom even. This movement is undoubtedly a seesawing, but, as Lawler rightly suggests (Mon Cœur mis à nu and Fusées surely confirm this), it is equally globally motivated and "macrocosmically" conceived and oriented. Very fine and telling analysis abounds, at once textually rooted and rationalised-an area in which James Lawler exercises characteristic mastery-and yet all is meditated with vision, rare sensibility, and discreet intensity. Poetry and Moral Dialectics, far from being a mere intellectual or theoretical exercise, offers a felt discourse, as eloquent and urgent, as motivated and exemplary as Baudelaire's own. Michael Bishop Dalhousie University Erratum: In Noah Guynn's article in vol. 39, no. 4 (Winter 1999) of L'Esprit Créateur, page 121, lines 1-2, all words after "Darius the Phrygian's De excidio Troiae historia" to the end of that sentence should have been omitted. We regret the oversight. 112 Spring 2000 ...

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