From Romantic poetry in Baudelaire's time to prose poems: Modernity, Melancholy and Urban Allegory

Abstract

Modernity without poetry makes its way in a terrible and devastating way in Baudelaire's time. The poet searches everywhere for the beauty that he remembers seeing in his dreams, and through his imagination. Modern poetry since Baudelaire will try to reform fallen nature in the light of the ideal. In this essay, modernity, melancholy and the allegory of the modern city will be analysed in the light of an ideal lost forever. Evil, the spleen of Paris, the sin of Christian origin, resonates in Baudelaire's small prose poems, like a new beginning of the modern poetic adventure.