Poetry's Blackberry Season: Baudelaire and the World Wide Web

Abstract

When poetry criticism took a turn inward in the mid-twentieth century, focusing on the text as a construct independent of context, or as a structure around which to experiment with theoretical concerns, many readers found that such inwardness reduced the poem to 'words, words, words' and sought their reading pleasures elsewhere. With the return in the 1980s and 1990s to contextualized readings, where poets and their works are set back into the society that produced them, poetry criticism regained a sense of connectedness, without losing the insights that came from new theoretical standpoints. The rise of easily accessible information technology, together with the World Wide Web, has allowed readers and critics to draw with previously unheard-of speed and ease on a vast array of contextualizing sources. Whether we look out from the text to its contextual framework or inward to the history of its production, we now have at our disposal countless potential readings of a poem. In this essay, I will seek to show how the bringing together of information technology and nineteenth-century poetry opens up a vibrant and resonating space in which the very multiplicity of paths we can follow has reinvigorated fascination with the pleasure of poetry.