Reading Echoes in Baudelaire: Between Philosophic and Genetic Approaches

Abstract

This essay examines points of intersection between philosophic and genetic approaches to poetry, using Baudelaire's 'Chant d'automne' as a test case. The guiding concept is that of the echo, which operates on both a local and a global level to invoke, on the one hand, the ways the poem functions as an overlapping series of systems of meaning and, on the other hand, the larger aesthetic and philosophical context of the text. My analysis considers visual and phonetic echoes before addressing the role of the poetic voice and the myth of Echo as they pertain to 'Chant d'automne'. The article gives attention to the particular ontological status that philosophical critics have afforded to poetry, whose space lies at the intersection of the conceptual and the sensory, the cultural and the material, and the textual and metaphysical.