Walter Benjamin and Baudelaire

'Everything becomes an allegory for me.'

-Baudelaire, Le Cygne



Baudelaire's genius, which is nourished on melancholy, is an allegorical  genius.  For the first time, with Baudelaire, Paris becomes the subject of lyric poetry.  This poetry is no hymn to the homeland; rather, the gaze of the allegorist, as if it falls on the city, is the gaze of the alienated man.  It is the gaze of the flaneur, whose way of life still conceals behind a mitigating nimbus the coming desolation of the big-city dweller.  The flaneur still stands on the threshold--of the metropolis as of the middle class.  Neither has him in its power yet.  In neither is he at home.  He seeks refuge in the crowd.  Early contributions to a physiognomics of the crowd are found in Engels and Poe.


-Benjamin, W.  The Arcades Project.  1940. 


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