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- Title
In der Vorhölle.
- Authors
Küster, Burkhart
- Abstract
In 1857 Édouard Thierry and Barbey d'Aurevilly enter into the defence of the Fleurs du Mal, arguing that these strange poems are related to Dante's Divina Commedia, the medieval model serving as a foil to the modern texts. Baudelaire intended to include those two vindicating articles in the third and final edition of his poetry, which seems to indicate that the French poet considered Dante's work relevant to the understanding of the Fleurs du Mal. When Baudelaire the art critic deals with Doré's and Delacroix's visual interpretations of Dante, he underlines the great sadness of the Commedia in words that touch on his spleen, the theme which predominates in the 'Limbes' series of 1850-1851. Baudelaire does not say which passages of the Commedia his poems are referring to, but luckily T.S. Eliot, who admired both Dante and Baudelaire, can help. Eliot mentions lines of the third canto of the Inferno that fuse easily with the 'Limbes' poems. Eliot and other thinkers were fond of the canto which describes the vestibule of Hell. Up to now, critics have mainly searched for similarities with Baudelaire's poems in the fourth canto of the Inferno, in Limbo, and have never found much. This article attempts to demonstrate that it is ideas from the third canto of the Inferno that can be conceived as a second voice to the 'Limbes', making the reading of Baudelaire's early poems a more enriching experience.
- Subjects
19TH century French poetry; FLEURS du mal (Book); DIVINE Comedy, The (Poem : Dante); THIERRY, Edouard; BARBEY d'Aurevilly, J. (Jules), 1808-1889
- Publication
Arcadia -- International Journal for Literary Studies, 2013, Vol 47, Issue 2, p385
- ISSN
0003-7982
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/arcadia-2012-0025