Imagination and Resistance

Abstract

Part III examines the new importance that Baudelaire attaches, following the trial of Les Fleurs du Mal, to the creative imagination as an instrument of resistance and alternative ‘government’. This chapter analyses his three essays on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, in which Baudelaire sees Poe as exemplifying the power of the imagination both to subvert normative thinking and to confront the destructive effects of melancholy by constructing new worlds. Baudelaire finds in Poe an image—and self-portrait—of the poet as outcast and embodiment of protest, a thinker probing the mysteries of nature in search of new explanatory laws: in short, a writer engaged in what Baudelaire calls ‘conjecturisme’. For Poe, as for Baudelaire’s alternative poet-lawgiver, beauty is a form of justice, and the public value of poetry lies not in overt didacticism but in the carefully crafted articulation of an original moral and intellectual vision.