Poe, Baudelaire and the break with the Romantics

Poe stands out quite starkly from his Romantic predecessors. The Romantics see Mankind as essentially good, especially the children before society has corrupted them. ‘Redemption’ would come from reconnection with Nature from which we have become estranged. Nature provides solace and strength, and epiphany lies in seeing its spiritual goodness, and the healing that can flow from it. The poets, like Wordsworth or Coleridge, wanted to show the spiritual significance of simple, even banal things by elevating the ordinary. Poe breaks radically from all this. The ordinary becomes extraordinary, and not a source of succour and goodness at all. In many ways, and this is why Baudelaire must have been so drawn to Poe, both men share a common ‘anti-Romantic’ vision. Baudelaire does not reject the spiritual, but the Rousseauian belief that man is by nature good. He admires Poe for declaring ‘the natural wickedness of man’ :

La plupart des erreurs relatives au beau naissent de la fausse conception du dix-huitième siècle relative à la morale. La nature fut prise dans ce temps-là comme base, source et type de tout bien et de tout beau possibles. La négation du péché originel ne fut pas pour peu de chose dans l’aveuglement général de cette époque...La nature ne peut conseiller que le crime… [Dans] toutes les actions et les désirs du pur homme naturel, vous ne trouverez rien que d’affreux.

(Eloge du maquillage)

This pessimism finds a strong echo in Poe. Both writers appear to be presenting us with a new ‘honesty’, a new ‘realism’, however paradoxical that might appear in Baudelaire’s artifice, and Poe’s supernatural world; a darker vision, in which our true nature is almost heroically embraced, warts and all.