Katsaros, Laure. Whitman, Baudelaire, and the Hybrid City. [review]

Laure Katsaros. New York-Paris: Whitman, Baudelaire, and the Hybrid City. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. 176pp.Connecting, comparing, and contrasting Whitman and Baudelaire is a frequent enough practice in Comparative Literature studies. One recurring feature of such analyses (as in Marshall Berman's recent chapter in A Political Companion to Walt Whitman [2010]) is their propensity to center on the amount of space devoted to the city by these poets, despite the fact that much of Whitman's imagination-starting with the title of his magnum opus-relies greatly on natural environments. Examining both poets together may appear the logical thing to do. After all, 1855 saw the publication both of Whitman's first sustained attempt at free verse and of eighteen poems by Baudelaire, which were to be included two years later in the earlier edition of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). It is a well-known fact (thanks, in part, to Betsy Erkkila's Walt Whitman Among the French: Poet and Myth [1980]) that the Good Gray Poet's perception of his French counterpart-mentioned only once in his writings, in his article "Poetry of the Future" [1881]-was as limited as it was inaccurate. To make things equally frustrating, there is no written record suggesting that the celebrated translator of Poe's stories and poems was even remotely aware of his American contemporary. The first-ever French review of Whitman's poetry, however, Louis Etienne's infamous "Walt Whitman, philosophe et 'rowdy,''' appeared in the November, 1861, issue of La Revue europeenne, which also featured one poem by Baudelaire-"Recueillement" ("Recollection"). Laure Katsaros, commenting on this happy coincidence, concludes that the French poet "went to extraordi- nary lengths to make sure that each of his published poems appeared exactly as he wanted them," and therefore could not have not cast at least a cursory glance at the remainder of the periodical, and, as a consequence, must have perused Etienne's scathing diatribe. Katsaros concludes that the "impression of Walt Whitman he would have received is a distinctly repugnant one." What ultimately links these poets, she notes, is that "[b]oth Whitman and Baudelaire, in the eyes of their more conventional contemporaries, degraded artistic and moral ideals by speaking of outcasts and ordinary people in a language more direct than poetry had ever used before."Katsaros, trained in France, is now an associate professor of French and European Studies at Amherst College. The book contains an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. Its central thesis is that both poets wrote at a time when their home cities-Paris for Baudelaire, New York for Whitman-were going through irreversible changes. This, the reader is led to infer, is probably what is meant by the "hybrid city" in the book's subtitle, a city in which traces of the past were being relentlessly smoothed over and the future was being ag- gressively actuated. For Katsaros, indeed, both the ruthless and much-needed remodelling of Paris by Baron Haussmann and New York's dizzying territorial and population expansion "encapsulated the political, cultural, and aesthetic uncertainties" out of which the poets perfected their own style and language. Katsaros focuses on both poets' rewriting of traditional poetry, which leads her to attend to Baudelaire's city-themed prose poems rather than his more lyrical and more influential rhymed poems.One thing that this book does not do, however, is offer a systematic exami- nation of the two poets side by side. After the thoroughly-researched general introduction, which adroitly puts both poets into perspective, they each go their separate ways, with Baudelaire making a brief reappearance at the end of the two chapters devoted to Whitman, while the latter is hardly ever mentioned in those focusing on Baudelaire. Reading the book cover to cover, readers might, because of this distance kept between the two poets, find its title somewhat deceptive. …