BAUDELAIRE underlying Chris an doctrine: the human capacity for suffering.

In an age that believed social

engineering could eradicate individual suffering, Baudelaire found no means to transcend his suffering,
T.S. Eliot's engagement with Charles Baudelaire's poetry, par cularly in a 1930 essay, offers cri cal
leading him to create poetry that seems to celebrate it.
insight into Eliot's regard for the French symbolist. Although it's challenging to quan fy Baudelaire's
influence on Eliot's work precisely, the essay reflects Eliot's admira on for Baudelaire during a period Eliot views Baudelaire as a religious vic m of his secular age, which removed religious solu ons to
of significant personal and ar s c transforma on for Eliot. By the late 1920s, Eliot's burgeoning human dilemmas. In a more religious era, Baudelaire's suffering might have been sanc oned and
Chris an beliefs were contras ng with the previous decade's op mism and aesthe c revolu onary understood within a spiritual context. However, in his own me, Baudelaire's suffering had to be
fervour. endured without the support of religious valida on, making his work a poignant reflec on of the moral
and spiritual void of his era.
Baudelaire, along with other French symbolists, is credited with introducing the modern urban
nightmare as a poe c theme. In an essay from the same period as his 1929 essay on Dante, Eliot In that way, Baudelaire's poetry "created a mode of release and expression for other men" of his own
discusses Baudelaire's comparison to Dante, sugges ng that many who enjoy Dante also appreciate me, so Eliot sees Baudelaire's primary concern as one that involves itself "not with black masses,
Baudelaire. Eliot himself views Baudelaire as a "more limited" Goethe but acknowledges Baudelaire's demons, and roman c blasphemy, but with the real problem of good and evil" ("moral Good and Evil,"
unique grasp of his era and his engagement with the "problem of good and evil," especially in the Eliot will call it for emphasis a few pages later). Rather than expressing either a Chris an or a Satanist
context of modern life's ennui. impulse, then, Baudelaire's poetry expresses the more or less religious impulse, con- fused and
conflic ng, that emerges among individuals caught up in a contemporary bureaucra c se ng, "a world
Eliot emphasizes Baudelaire's acute sense of his age, paralleling his earlier arguments in his 1927 essay
of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reforms, and dress reforms"-a world, in other words, very much
"Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," where he posits that great poets write their me into their
like Eliot's own, the world of the modern.
work. This historical consciousness, Eliot argues, is crucial for a poet and is a theme he explores in his
1919 essay "Tradi on and the Individual Talent." For Eliot, understanding one's me and its place in In such a world, Baudelaire discovers that one s ll is free to make great moral choices, even if they
history is vital for a poet, a view he holds as nearly indispensable for con nuing poe c relevance past may be those that other, more theologically coherent epochs-Dante's, for example-may, with its
one's youth. devo on to the orthodoxy of doctrine, very well have condemned. Eliot sees Baudelaire coming to
recognize that "damna on itself is an immediate form or salva on," since it is "salva on from the
Eliot's own poetry o en bridges vast temporal and cultural divides, reflec ng his belief that great poets
ennui of modern life, because it at least gives some significance to living." So, then, Baudelaire may
objec fy the experience of their historical moments. Including Baudelaire among great poets like
indeed be "a bungler compared to Dante," but as Eliot duly notes as well in an earlier comparison of
Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare honors Baudelaire's contribu on to the cultural tradi on. Eliot
his of Dante with Shakespeare, the poet must work with the material that the age into which he was
sees these poets as con nually enriching cultural tradi on, even when they challenge it.
born provides him, and that, good or bad, is just the luck of the draw. It is what a poet like Baudelaire
By the 1930s, Eliot's view of Western literary tradi ons had evolved. He no longer saw them as a self- then does with that material, almost in spite of himself, that enables him, if he is successful at merging
correc ng mechanism but recognized the varying fer lity of different historical epochs for producing the personal and the public in his art, to become the poet of his age. Baudelaire, in Eliot's eyes,
great poetry. This shi in perspec ve involves a nuanced cultural rela vism that verges on moral demonstrates that "it is be er, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist."
absolu sm. Eliot explores the rela onship between tradi on and belief in his essays and gave these
Eliot's may seem to an odd way to come to Baudelaire's defence, but only if the essay is thought of as
ideas a fuller hearing in his 1933 lectures tled "A er Strange Gods," a er which he moved on from
a defence. If it is seen instead as a prescrip on for what a person of conscience must do in a
them.
conscienceless world, then it suggests that making moral choices in poetry is a requirement of great
In his 1930 essay on Charles Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot examines the conflict between order and chaos, a poetry, no ma er what those moral choices may be. Eliot, no doubt, is talking about the climate of his
theme reflected in both his prose cri cism and poetry. Eliot praises Baudelaire not for his values but own me when he talks about the climate of Baudelaire's. Whether or not moral choices con nued in
for his acute sense of his era, which Eliot believes produced "outmoded nonsense." This term likely Eliot's me to be as desperate for the person of conscience depends to a great extent on how much
refers to the secularism and scien fic posi vism of Baudelaire's me. Despite the sophis ca on of his the moral daring of a poet like Baudelaire may have opened the imagina on to strategies for dealing,
age, Baudelaire's poetry reveals a "theological innocence," as he discovered Chris anity for personal in a godless public world, with the demands that individuals nevertheless privately make on the divine
reasons rather than social or poli cal mo va ons. Eliot suggests that Baudelaire, rather than being a as an implied presence in human affairs and as an implied por on of each person's being.
prac cing Chris an, asserted the necessity of Chris anity in a me of disbelief.
The distance between poetry and belief becomes, for Eliot, shorter the more one focuses on the belief
Eliot does not classify Baudelaire as a Chris an poet but acknowledges that Baudelaire's work reflects and not the poetry. In Baudelaire's case, he is saying that there is no way to separate the two to begin
the moral and spiritual confusion of 19th-century Europe. This era, following significant social and with, since Baudelaire had no belief system to fall back on besides the one that his own day-to-day
poli cal upheaval, experienced a crisis of faith. Baudelaire's poetry embodies the chao c moral vision experience in a modern metropolis itself provided him with. As Eliot has outlined it here, the case of
resul ng from this evalua ve chaos. Eliot argues that Baudelaire's "sense of his age" conveys the Baudelaire proves that such spiritually thin gruel, for a person of passionate convic on, can result in a
unmodified confusion among moral, spiritual, and secular values of his me. poe c feast that may not be to everyone's taste but is to everyone's advantage.

Eliot cri ques the tendency to label Baudelaire either as a Satanist or a Catholic Chris an, emphasizing
that his point is to illustrate Baudelaire's struggle between rejec on and acceptance of the principle