Allegory in the World of the Commodity
The Importance of Central Park
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4071330 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lloyd Spencer, Lloyd Kendell Spencer (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1985 |
| Issue | 34 |
| Pages | 59 |
| Publication date | 1985-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New German Critique (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-033X • E-ISSN: 1558-1462 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/488339 |
| OpenAlex | W2330413578 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
Baudelaire's sonnet Correspondences (from which these lines are taken) plays a crucial role within the Fleurs du mal. It is not the first poem, but it occurs in the opening sequence. Its significance in directing our reading of the poems as a whole can hardly be side-stepped. Anyone who would understand and fully enjoy the power of Baudelaire's verse will take note of this disclosure by the poet of one of the vital sources of his poetic gift: his ability to provoke the imagination by evoking between sensations of apparently quite different orders. Benjamin himself, for instance, in his response to the kaleidoscopic disorder of the no-longer-fashionable arcades, shows that he has been schooled in Baudelaire's sensuous discipline. Benjamin's treatment of Baudelaire as an allegorist is, however, directed against a sympathetic misreading of Baudelaire which allowed the doctrine of the correspondences to eclipse allegory as a less obvious, and less directly influential doctrine at work in the poetry. The statement of the doctrine of the correspondences in the sonnet is so succinct and eloquent, so illuminating of one's experience of the poetry, that Baudelaire's most ardent admirers, the Symbolists and the poets of the decadence, tended to approach the Fleurs du mal as a whole as if, in this one poem, the last critical and explanatory word had been said. As a result they not only obscured important counter-tendencies at work in Baudelaire's poems, they succeeded also in making of the doctrine of
Allegory · Art history · Commodity · Economics · Market economy · French Literature and Poetry · History
| Citations per year | 0.23 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1991 - 2018 (28) |
| Highly cited | No |