Cursed

We are familiar with this picture that seems to come from another continent: the poet, exiled from Kallipolis, threadbare, smelly, homeless, an insomniac, living with no schedule, and producing things whose function is unclear: poems. He rarely finds place within a structure. He is outside. Even if he wanted to return, Kallipolis would not take him back. Within the ideal city of Plato's imagination, the poet is an element whose function is only to praise the herowhich we know does not work because heroes are figures who freeze in obligatory odes. So there is some truth, albeit slightly exaggerated, in Alfred de Vigny's words of 1832, that poets are "the race always cursed by the powerful of the earth."

At the time he wrote this, the cities of Europe, and particularly Paris, were beginning to move with modern design that was streamlined and ordered. Poetry, with its unpredictability, was increasingly alien within it. Paul Verlaine compiled an anthology of poetry, les Potes maudits, which was published in 1884: the works of 'the cursed poets'. Included in this group were Verlaine himself, along with Rimbaud and Mallarmto mention only those who are best known outside of France. And at the forefront: Baudelaire.

July 12, 2016