Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Baudelaire, Charles - Jonathan Monroe (essay date 1987)

Baudelaire, Charles - Jonathan Monroe (essay date 1987)

Jonathan Monroe (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: "Baudelaire's Poor: The Petitis poèmes en prose and the Social Reinscription of the Lyric," in A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre, Cornell, 1987, pp. 93-124.

[Monroe is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he maintains that economic and social concerns motivated Baudelaire's use of the prose poem.]

Baudelaire and women:

[Passionate] clinging to his maternal apron-strings crippled Baudelaire's sexuality. Contempt made him, it seems, impotent: in his poetry he is left, supremely, a voyeur. The ideals of mutual or procreative love held no allure for him: he felt only a sado-masochistic struggle 'in which one of the players must lose their self-control' [Joanna Richardson, Baudelaire, 1994]. Hence his long devotion to the octoroon Jeanne Duval, the démon sans pitié who bled him dry and...

[The entire page is 11514 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass