Modern Beauty: Baudelaire, the Everyday, Cultural Studies

Abstract

This article rethinks the usual divide between poetry and cultural studies by showing that the latter inherits from the former the art of knowing the everyday. It identifies Baudelaire's crucial intervention in the becoming-essay-like of poetic form by considering three poems in the context of cultural studies theorist Meaghan Morris's work, notably her discussion of the work of Australian poet John Forbes. The historic turn of modern poetry to everyday subject matter might be described as having had as a consequence a certain 'becoming-essayistic' of lyric inspiration and poetic form. The ethical dimension of the everyday is explored through a discussion of the shock of knowing and the 'soubresauts de la conscience' put in motion by Baudelaire's writing of the city. The experience, part astonishment and part stupidity, that the article describes as the shock of knowing, is the experience shared by contemporary cultural critics and a line of poets of the everyday that stems from Baudelaire.