We live in a period in which liberal ideas about personal autonomy is under considerable pressure. Can poems be liberal? Baudelaire’s Enivrez-Vous captures something essential about the most appealing forms of liberalism, and about its underlying spirit (captured, in different ways, by John Stuart Mill, Walt Whitman, and Bob Dylan as well): its insistence on freedom of choice, on the diversity of tastes and preferences, and on human agency. The poem is liberal in its exuberance – its pleasure in its own edginess, its defiance, its sheer rebelliousness, its sense of mischief, its implicit laughter, its love of life and what it has to offer. It is the opposite of dutiful. It is far more exuberant than Mill’s On Liberty, but it is exuberant in the same way. It tells us something important about autonomy and freedom.

8. Disgrace is read in its relation to numerous unacknowledged narrative influences, including Richardsons Clarissa and Tolstoys Resurrection.

Ch 3: The third chapter concerns pleasure and happiness conveyed by a brief moment in time. Ronsard’s hedonistic poem uses dialectical reasoning and rhetorical deliberation to perfect the pleasure that is ephemeral. It is because the pleasure does not last that it becomes an absolute imperative; the pleasure of the moment is not viewed as lesser than the happiness conferred in duration. In the Princesse de Clèves, a scene of mutual pleasure taken by the protagonist and her beloved is reduced to a series of statements of causation, submitted to intense pressure of time, and turns out to be the only “pure” joy the protagonist feels throughout the novel. Baudelaire’s famous “À une passante,” an example of the new urban lyric, ironizes the lyric tradition while similarly proposing the ephemeral as the source of perfect pleasure.

From his Rimbaldian early poetry to his tri-continental and globe-spanning novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666, Bolaño maintains a critically “exilic” distance from both literary and political forms of nationalism. Writing, in his own words, from a ‘wild’ space ‘equally distant from all the countries in the world’, Bolaño inscribes poetry in particular under the weight of a double destitution: as a synecdoche for poverty, exile, errancy and disappearance, on the one hand, and for a will to become ungovernable on the other. Yet, in mapping out the cumulative wanderings of these errant poet-underdogs, Bolaño’s oeuvre does not stop at exposing the ‘nation’ to its anomic ‘unhomeliness’ in times of globalization. Indeed, in radicalizing both Baudelaire’s spirit of indifference to social forms and Melville’s dismantling of the narrative form, Bolaño exposes both world and work to radical contingency, making the errant poetic-underdog the figure of radical ungovernability. Tracing these constellations through brief discussions of ‘The Romantic Dogs’, The Savage Detectives, Amulet, a selection of short stories from Putas asesinas, 2666, and Antwerp, the chapter draws its theoretical inspiration from Giorgio Agamben’s essay ‘What is a Destituent Power’.

This essay looks at the intertextual presence of French literature in Bolaño’s writings, which are famously global in their intersecting plots and cosmopolitan characters. With a focus on the contemporary urban experience, Bolaño elevates the Baudelairean flâneur motif to a global scale, and inherits the Surrealist topos of the city as a place of chance encounters. The quest for a missing or forgotten writer, a structuring device used over and over in Bolaño’s fictions, can be traced back to Surrealist aesthetics, and it also provides a serviceable image of a quest for the validation of narrative. We look at what Bolaño’s novels, in which“visceral realism” defeats the grand 19th-century principle of the well-constructed plot in favor of a loose stringing together of episodic lives, owe to the tradition of Marcel Schwob’s imaginary lives, to Georges Perec’s aesthetics of the collection, the list, and the “infra-ordinary,” and to more contemporary poets of documentary everydayness and small lives such as Pierre Michon and François Bon.

Chapter 4 takes personification as its point of departure in the wake of Wordsworth’s well-known dismissal of it. From this perspective, Coleridge’s early conversation poems – where a tenuous reciprocity with the natural world is with difficulty achieved through the unfolding artifice of the poem – and Clare’s recreations in verse of remembered conversations with self-personifying natural things are inventive extensions of eighteenth-century methods for putting human beings into social converse with the natural world. Both, the chapter argues, are instances of what Jonathan Culler calls “projects of animation”: poems where more subtle practices of personification support a poetry that reaches out to a chattering world of non-human beings and things to make them talk not only to each other but also, at least in poetry, to us. Such tactics seemed altogether more possible, however, early in the century than toward its close – as the poetry of Swinburne’s French correspondents, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, makes clear.

Chapter one defines and historically situates the intersections among decadence, ecology, and the pagan revival in literature and art. Noting ecological, scientific, classist, nationalist, and imperialist aspects of decadence in its earliest articulations, focus is given to the shifting formulations of modern decadence in particular by such influential writers as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Bourget, and Max Nordau, the chapter offers close analyses of works by Algernon Swinburne such as his poem ‘The Leper’ (1866) and the Pre-Raphaelite artist Frederick Sandys such as his painting Medea (1868) that demonstrate the complex interplay across these concepts.

The essay argues that Bishop sees poems as a series of possibilities to be revisited gratefully, shrewdly, critically, neither agonistically as precursors to battle or displace, nor polemically in the spirit of a literary politics championing a school or movement. It canvasses her relation to a range of nineteenth-century poets, focusing first from the Romantic period on Blake, to whose visionary poetics she adds a skeptical element, and Wordsworth. The essay finds Wordsworthian elements in her use of the word “something,” her intuition that crucial moments combine negativity and revelation, and her central insistence on the provisionality of vision. It then suggests that Bishop was prompted creatively by two Victorian genres: first, the dramatic monologue, with speakers liberated from accuracy and articulate in their egotism; second, nonsense poetry, with its minor-key version of transcendent magic and its frequent link of the “awful but cheerful.” The other abiding Victorian influence was Hopkins, along with Wordsworth and Baudelaire an exemplar dynamically observing his own process of observation.

Written in 1981-82 and published in 1984, Monsieur Pain shares Antwerp’s interest in forms that might combine the prose poem’s characteristic brevity and intensity with the significantly more expansive, still relatively condensed narrative possibilities of the novella. While Antwerp is arguably best understood less as a “novel” than as a parodic assemblage of prose poems, Monsieur Pain marks a pivotal transition toward the former. At the heart of the narrative’s complex of interrelated concerns is César Vallejo’s status as a pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century poetry. Situating the narrative’s fictive world in the specific context of Vallejo’s last days in “PARIS, 1938,” Monsieur Pain presents the reader, in its own segmented, prose-poetic fashion, with an intricate form of figuration and representation inseparable from its conceptual, affective, psychoanalytic, philosophical, social, historical, political, economic, narratological stakes and implications. Through its comical yet serious, labyrinthine imagining of Vallejo’s absurd passing, dying of “hiccups” yet “anchored in the real world,” Monsieur Pain affirms the continuing capacity of poetry, if not to cure, then at least to engage the urgent issues and questions of its time, of Vallejo’s, of Bolaño’s, of our own.

Questions of genre, of the commodification of genres and of genres as commodities, of their specialization and marketability, questions central to the institutionalization of creative writing in the academy over the past several decades, preoccupied Bolaño early on when the idea of making a living from writing appeared beyond reach. Written in 1980 but only published in 2002 (its English translation not appearing until 2010), Amberes/Antwerp has aptly been called the “Big Bang of the Bolaño universe.” Recalling Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between the novel’s characteristically dialogical, heteroglossic investments and poetry’s more monological tendencies, Antwerp pursues a consistently dialogic, heteroglossic self-questioning. Oscillating between minimalist narrative and meta-lingual, meta-fictional, meta-textual gestures, it continually stages its own suspension and recommencing. Torn between the pleasure and urgency of a “tax-free” poetic discourse and the commercial viability of the detective novel, the Bolaño of Antwerp aspires to write not “novels that are copies of other novels” but a genreless text in which he can affirm, without reserve, that “‘the only beautiful thing here is the language.’” Positioned roughly halfway between Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris and Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Antwerp remains Bolaño’s most disjunctively Rimbaldian performance.

The introduction reads Yeats’ record of his meeting with Joyce in 1902 and uncovers in Joyce’s declaration of his intention to write prose poetry an unacknowledged echoing of Baudelaire’s idea for prose poétique. It explores the Parisian context of Baudelaire’s ambition to develop a new kind of materially displaced thinking and considers it in relation to New Materialism: While neo-materialist approaches would shift emphasis and agency from a Cartesian subject to the world of matter, Baudelaire’s “things think through me, or I through them” retains a vital openness. It is here that I introduce the concept of Joyce’s sentient thinking, an undoing of the sovereign and dominating subject that offers new possibilities of cooperative co-being. The introduction theorizes Joyce’s exploration of a lived aesthetic practice with reference to accounts of subjectivity such as Judith Butler’s Senses of the Subject (2016) and works on reason under capitalism such as Martin Jay’s Reason After Its Eclipse (2016).

Decadent artists and writers in the second half of the nineteenth century were fascinated by the chaos and thrill of modern life, but they were to a much greater extent disgusted by the impact of so much social and cultural change. Baron Haussmann transformed Paris in the 1850s and 1860s into a booming metropolitan marvel, but in Les fleurs du mal (1857) Charles Baudelaire evokes the city as both spectacle and spectre. 350,000 people were displaced to the outskirts of the city during this period as new commercial sites replaced the medieval streets and alleyways. In this chapter, the development of the concept of decadence as a critique of urban progress is traced via Baudelaire’s foundational collection of poems and its influence on other writers, like Théophile Gautier, Émile Zola, and Joris-Karl Huysmans whose novel À rebours (1884) evokes the spiritual wasteland and psychological alienation that are the advance of modernity.

Traditional Christianity includes a number of ideas with affinities to decadence, notably the eschatological belief that the end of the world is imminent (a belief that has its secular counterpart in the idea of historical and social decline) and the dogma of original sin. This chapter sketches out ‘a theology of decadence’ by showing how particular theological ideas ? principally those concerned with transgression, punishment, and apocalypse ? grew anew in the strange and modern hothouse of decadent literary form. Baudelaire and his use of original sin as formulated by the Catholic theologian Joseph de Maistre ramifies into the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans before moving on to the apocalyptically-charged flowering of decadence in England at the Victorian fin de siècle. These theological influences are particularly evident in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where Wilde reflects the dual inheritance of an aesthetic relativism derived from Walter Pater and theological ideas of sin and punishment as a form of apocalyptic crisis.

Notions of decadence, decline, and decay are intrinsically linked to the history of art. The discipline’s three recognized forefathers ? Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin ? all relied on the concept of decadence (and its antonym, progress) to make sense of the history of the visual arts and to evaluate the art of their times. A developmental model of art was central to the interpretative schemes of these art historians. In this organicist model, earlier developments prepare the stage for what comes later; and after a particular style flourishes for a time, its decline is inevitable as newer styles overtake it. Decadent artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley mock aesthetic standards and moral rules, precluding universal appreciation, and proudly so. Decadent artists and decadent audiences are estranged from their society and feel disdain for those who are scandalized by decadent art’s innovative form and immoral subject matter.

The Romans had a difficult relationship with the kind of luxury and excess that we think of as indicators of moral and social decadence. But in many ways they revelled in such luxury. Readily accepting the financial rewards of empire, they spent huge sums on their own benefits. Whether in the colossal public games in the amphitheatre and the circus, in the opulent imperial bath complexes, or in extravagant private villas, Romans of all social levels delighted in the very best that life was thought to offer. Chapter 1 examines how far the evidence supports this somewhat melodramatic view of Rome by looking at the ways in which luxury spread in the Roman world. It also looks at the ways this growth in luxury compelled the Romans to create new concepts to understand the phenomenon. Luxury was almost never seen as a simple index of increased wealth. Rather, it raised all manner of moral issues among Rome’s ruling classes, many of which long outlived the end of the Roman empire itself.