Melancholy Tone Of Poetry By Baudlaire

Baudelaire and his poems are famous for the tone of “melancholy”. This paper will studyBaudelaire’s spiritual world and explore a modern cultural crisis with an entry point of“melancholy” brought by a phenomenon of “God is dead”. When his ability to feel lifeexperience that another man feels disappeared, only left absurd broken shadow, Baudelaireseemed to see the world full of ruins, and he right stood above the ruins and turned to save thedisappeared aesthetic ideal. From a vision of concerning the existent state of people, it is notonly significant to study Baudelaire for knowing an era in which the poet lived, but also itplays a role of reference for our present society.This paper will be divided into three parts:In the first part, the breakage between Baudelaire’s aesthetic ideal and the real world willbe analyzed. In the age of “absence of God”, life is rootless among people, whose “lifeexperience” is also serious lack, aesthetic ideal returns to the darkness and the real world fallsinto a state of faithlessness. The poet’s melancholy results from an enormous tension betweenfaithless real world and Baudelaire’s distant aesthetic ideal.In the second part, the tone of Baudelaire’s melancholy will be illustrated with SusanSontag’s “the style of Saturn”. There are three aspects in this part. Firstly, the sense ofloneliness: The poet feels loneliness in the “crowd”, whose composition is quite complicated,because its members come from all stratums in society. The poet seems to be at a lossbetween apathy, deceit and lies. Secondly, the sense of anxiety: the loneliness in indifferent“crowd” triggers the poet’s thought about his era and his own existence. As a sober in his age,the poet feels quite anxiety. That is to say, anxiety is a direct feeling for life, a deep worryabout life can not returning to nature and a resistance to the order of reality. Thirdly, theconsciousness of ruins: Baudelaire sketched Paris into a picture of end word with a style ofruins. While ruins is a kind of metaphor in modern Western civilization, what the poet can dois to faithfully record the end world picture with a kind of melancholy eyes.In the third part, two core images-“the image of death” and “the image of woman” will be analyzed by the chief source of Baudelaire’s poetry, in which the tone of melancholy willalso be explored. The image of “death” is a very important image for Baudelaire tounderstand the real world, and the images of “carrion” and “Skull” are also used to shock theheart of the people.“Woman” is also an important concern for Baudelaire, who sometimesconsiders the image of “woman” as an embodiment of ideal, and sometimes as a portrayal ofthe real world. Therefore, the images of “death” and “woman” form the image of Paris.