Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Walter Benjamin’s essays on Charles Baudelaire from the 1930s ac- complished nothing less than a wholesale reinvention of the great French poet as the representative writer of urban capitalist moder- nity. Before Benjamin’s radical reorientation of our image of the poet Baudelaire had usually been considered in purely aesthetic terms-as a late Romantic or as a forerunner of the French Symbol- ists. For Benjamin however Baudelaire’s greatness consisted pre- cisely in his representativeness: in the manner in which his poetry- often against its express intent-laid open the structure and mecha- nisms of his age. Benjamin was hardly alone among his contempo- raries of course in his estimation of Baudelaire as the first fully modern writer. In England Baudelaire was a touchstone for T. S. Eliot who translated Baudelaire into English and produced an im- portant essay on Baudelaire’s relation to modernity. In Germany the great lyric poet Stefan George was an important link between Baudelaire and modern German writing: George’s translation of Les Fleurs du mal is still in many ways unsurpassed. Yet Eliot and George saw in Baudelaire a writer very different from the one discov ered by Benjamin For Eliot. (SP)