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Baudelaire: The Eye of a Sensitive Spectator

Baudelaire: The Eye of a Sensitive Spectator

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Poetic Outlaws
Feb 22, 2024
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Baudelaire: The Eye of a Sensitive Spectator
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Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.

-Charles Baudelaire

Frank Pearce Sturm 1919:

[Baudelaire] looked upon life very much as Poe, whom he so admired, looked upon it: with the eye of a sensitive spectator in some gloomy vault of the Spanish Inquisition, where beauty was upon the rack; he was horrified, but unable to turn from a sight that fascinated him by its very terror.

His moments of inspiration are haunted by the consciousness that evil beings, clothed with horror as with a shroud, are ever lingering about the temple of life and awaiting an opportunity to enter.

He was like a man who awakens trembling from a nightmare, afraid of the darkness, and unable to believe the dawn may be less hopeless than the midnight.

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