The influence of Edgar Allan Poe on Charles Baudelaire’s prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris

Irwin, Allan Reginald (2025). The influence of Edgar Allan Poe on Charles Baudelaire’s prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris. University of Birmingham. M.A.

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Abstract

This thesis provides an analysis of the important works of Edgar Allan Poe alongside the prose poems of Charles Baudelaire in order to quantify the extent of the influence which the American author exerted on the French poet. It concludes that the influence is largely one of unconscious assimilation, even though it identifies notable examples of prose poems which are immediately recognisable in the similarity of their form and/or content to Poe’s tales.

It was Baudelaire, himself, who first became aware of the affinity that existed between him and Poe when he read a translation of ‘The Black Cat’. He was struck by the uncanny resemblance of the American author’s work to his own, even to the extent of constructing the same sentences without any previous familiarity with his work. His discovery led him to establish a strong personal identification with Poe, partly as a result of pre-existing resemblances contained in their publications, and partly as a result of Baudelaire’s subsequent portrayal of Poe as an American version of himself. Baudelaire saw in Poe the same sense of rebellion against the contemporaneous literary establishment which he recognised in himself, and which was an essential motivating force for both authors in their quest for modernity. Establishing a new direction in poetry was all the more difficult for Baudelaire, given his staunch attachment to the status quo, but his discovery of Poe reinforced his ground-breaking ideas, and gave him the confidence to innovate, in the knowledge that there was at least one prestigious author whose thoughts on literary composition matched his own. I trace the route taken by Baudelaire in transforming the conventional, predominantly alexandrine poetry of Les Fleurs du Mal into the revolutionary prose poetry of Le Spleen de Paris. The prose poems are synonymous with Baudelaire’s modernity, and their publication late in his career meant that they were subject to the full influence of his much-admired translations of Poe’s tales. These translations not only presented the tales in a form which was readily acceptable to the French reading public, but they also provided Baudelaire with a vast store of knowledge and skills which he later put to use in his own poetry, sometimes adopting Poe’s style in a consciously imitative way, but more often reflecting the sort of indirect influence which could be classified as unconscious. It also provided Baudelaire with a valuable training ground from which he could learn from his own methods and apply them to his prose poems – a process which could be described as self-reflexive.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Masters by Research > M.A.)

Award Type:

Masters by Research > M.A.

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