Baudelaire « CONNECT/HOOK

Christian brothers and sisters may question me for including one of the “Flowers of Evil” (Recueillement) among my offerings here – but we must remember that Christ was a man of sorrows. It’s all in how you see it. After all, one can read the Gospels as the ultimate Gothic tragedy which turns into eternal triumph [think of all those funereal cypresses, night meetings in whitewashed alleys, tombs, enclosed gardens, stinking corpses arising from the grave and sobbing veiled women next to bloody pain-wracked bodies expiring under a black sky].

I personally associate the “long linceul traînant à l’Orient” [The long shroud trailing toward the East] not only with encroaching Night (which I think the poet intended) but also with the shroud of shrouds.

The illustration on the poem page is by American artist W.D. Heath and was done in 1900 for an Edition of poems by Edgar Allan Poe. The title The Night’s Plutonian Shore is from a line in Poe’s The Raven

If you think this poem is a death-trip, try reading Psalm 88!

I like old-school lyrics. Meaning from around 1685 or later.

Do you like poetry? What kind – what poets?

I can’t stand most modern, academic esoteric intentionally cryptic free verse. Who reads that stuff anyway? Forget those weak little ditherings in the margin of New Yorker and Atlantic – how boring. And although I once believed in it, I grew out of stridently political agit-prop years ago as well. Give me real poetry please!

I was forced to analyze poetry in school and I resented it. Maybe a few lines here and there [E.E. Cummings, Ogden Nash] were amusing but it was nothing I ever chose to read on my own. Years later I got turned on to French poets like Baudelaire, G. de Nerval, Rimbaud and others who had some great hypnotic rhythms and rhyme combined with astral imagery and intense feeling. I began to realize that I did like poetry – that kind at least. Later, stranded in the Arizona desert with the New Oxford Book of English Verse [1250-1950…new indeed!], I found great treasures. Many of them I have posted, and will continue to post here for your enjoyment. I discovered that being alone in the desert was the ideal way to develop appreciation for poetry. This was in the late 80’s to mid 90’s before the age of cyber-connectivity had infected me. After my mind cleared from the barrage of stimuli considered normal, I found that I was reading these old works with new perception. It was like actually communing with the mind of the writer, no matter how distant [or near] in time. It was a spiritual realization for me. Perhaps some of you have also experienced that realization – maybe you are so blessed that you don’t have to live in the desert as I had to reach that state of cerebral clarity. In this age of rampant pragmatism and commodified common-sense, it is almost shameful to confess that I love poetry.
Do you also hesitate before divulging your love of poetry?