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Melancholy and the Poetic Act

This chapter prepares for later discussion (in Part IV) of Les Fleurs du Mal as a poetic performance by examining how for Baudelaire poetry offers a palliative to melancholy through the creativity inherent in the poetic act itself. It offers a reading of ‘Une charogne’ as a form of ars poetica in which the very process of decomposition is perceived as essential to that of (re)composition. It then discusses the four ‘Spleen’ poems as illustrations of the nothingness of melancholy being transformed by the poetic act into a plenitude of activity and spectacle: a redemption, or buying back, of life from decay, entropy, and death. For the melancholic the world is a place of contingency and clutter, whereas the poet as alternative lawgiver reassembles the familiar and proposes new patterns of significance within which to situate the mess—or ‘le Mal’—of the human condition.