Baudelaire’s Modernity

The essay is devoted to Walter Benjamin’s critique of Baudelaire. Benjamin presents Baudelaire’s vision of modernity and at the same time his blindness to its most decisive aspects, aspects that nevertheless become manifest through a critique of his poetry. Thus, one should from the start distinguish what Baudelaire aims to address in his poetry, from what shows in and through it. In what follows, I will present Benjamin’s account of the more explicit themes of Baudelaire’s poetry, but also of the inconspicuous places through which the configuration of modernity is drawn. With Baudelaire, the modern enters poetry, and poetry is given the task of providing us with the form of that space of experience, “to give shape to modernity.”