Baudelaire's Street Poetry

The "modernity" of the street poems of the "Tableaux parisiens" arises from the fact that the street stands both for the question of the meaningfulness of urban experience and for a language in which poetic meaning is subject to chance. Disintegration and randomness are at the heart of both problems, but it is noise, as a phenomenon of communicational entropy, that makes the Baudelairean street at once a place of encounters with death and one that problematizes poetic language. The poems are analyzed thematically (in terms of the incorporation of death into modern beauty) and as manifestations of a poetics that introduces noise into the texture of poetry, an æsthetic phenomenon that appears as the oppositional return in poetry of the recently repressed political revolution of 1848. (RC)