of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………....2 Introduction: Madness in the Romantic Era……………………………………………………5 Chapter 1: Keats, Coleridge, and The Melancholy of Furor Poeticus………………………..14 Chapter 2: Les Fleurs du Mal and The Pathology of ennui…………………………………...47 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………...71
strophe, the poet predicts the onset of a storm on the night of the poem’s writing. He does this through a comparison of the moon’s appearance to its appearance in the ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, noting that they are similar. After a vivid description of a tempestuous storm, the poet reveals his hope in the concluding couplet that “Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, / Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!” (1.19-20). These lines offer the first indication of the poet’s emotional desolation. His misery and impaired capacity for deep emotion are such that he hopes for the onset of a storm to “startle this dull pain” simply so that he can experience some profound feeling and “make it live!” Beginning with the final couplet of the first stanza, we begin to see a description of melancholy emerge throughout the ode that destabilizes melancholia as a form of insanity as it was defined in Coleridge’s time. The poet’s idiosyncratic brand of pain is expanded upon in the opening lines of the second stanza, which read: A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassion’d grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In words, or sigh, or tear— (2. 21-24) The experience described by the poet in this stanza takes what we know to be defining symptoms of depression, hopelessness and loss of pleasure (Jamison 3), and makes it emotionally resonant and vicariously accessible. The succession of “pang, void, dark, and drear” conjures a sensation of hollowness and absence of any stimulating emotion. The pairing of “grief” and “no relief,” and “drear” and “tear,” impresses upon the reader the feeling of melancholy as an oppressive force. It robs one of not just feeling, but the capacity to feel, and offers no relief. It is not, however, a kind of delirium or, “break with the truth” which was an inextricable feature of
languishing over the impossibility of escape. This tension becomes, as we shall later see, a defining feature of Baudelaire’s “ennui.” The final verses of “Correspondences” mark the turn of the sonnet and perhaps the most significant instance of irony in the poem. In it, natural and artificial modalities of sublime experience become obscured to such a degree that nature ceases to be a subject of the poem, and instead recedes into a mere allegorical object. The passage reads: Odours there are, fresh as a baby’s skin, Mellow as oboes, green as meadow grass, —Others corrupted, rich, triumphant, full Having dimensions infinitely vast, Frankincense, musk, ambergris, benjamin, Singing the senses’ rapture, and the soul’s. (9-14) The trope of synaesthesia is continued in the first two verses, with Baudelaire’s preferred sense of odour evoking the freshness of “a baby’s skin” (9), the mellowness of “oboes,” and the green color of “meadow grass” (10). However, the jarring use of the horizontal bar in line 11 signals odors of a different variety, ones that are both “corrupted” and “triumphant.” These odors, “Frankincense, musk, ambergris, [and] benjamin” (12) are all ingredients used in medicine, leading a number of scholars to read this as Baudelaire’s advocation of drug-induced alternate states of consciousness (Schlossman). Interestingly, the odors of nature correspond to definitive sensory experiences—sight, touch, taste—but do not transcend into the numinous or sublime experience that, in Romantic poetry, occurs when one encounters nature. Bersani importantly notes that, in contrast, the odors of the stimulants don't evoke any concrete sensory experience, but rather “they ‘expand’ and they ‘transport,’ they become ‘infinite things’ (beyond the senses)
this passage. The “long worms” that crawl to the dead matter within the poet are like remorse. This inversion of the sequence of analogy indicates that emotions like remorse have become foreign to the poet, he must rely on the image of the “long worms” to remind himself of remorse’s character. Finally, this passage marks a long sequence where the poet refers to himself strictly through allegory, being “a graveyard”(2.8) and “a dusty boudour” (2.13). It would appear that spleen has left the poet no longer able to reflect upon himself independently; rather he must identify with objects like a graveyard or boudour that are emblematic of his emotional state. This alienation from the self reaches its apex in the final verses of Spleen II. The line break signals the initiation of a dialogue between the poet and his own disenfranchised, physical self. He remarks: —Henceforth, o living flesh, you are no more! You are of granite, wrapped in a vague dread, Slumbering in some Sahara’s hazy sands, An ancient sphinx lost to a careless world, Forgotten on the map, whose haughty mood Sings only in the glow of the setting sun. (2.19-24) The poet renounces his own corporeal body in this stanza, claiming, “you are no more! / You are of granite, wrapped in a vague dread” (2.19-20). The body as both as an organic entity and a manifestation of the poet’s self is “no more,” and is instead rendered into “granite,” or dead matter seemingly like his memories. The poet’s alienation from himself is juxtaposed with the image of an “ancient sphinx lost to a careless world / [that] Sings only in the glow of the setting sun.” (2.22)—an allusion to the Statue of Memnom that Baudelaire modifies to into a symbol of the isolating marginality of the poet. Pairing this allusion of alienation from society alongside an
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