Imagination and Conjecture

This chapter discusses the importance attributed to conjecture in Baudelaire’s writings on Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo. It shows how Baudelaire diverges from Poe in seeing beauty not as ‘an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave’ but as a glimpse of mysteries in the here and now. Recalling the ‘conjecturisme’ of Poe’s narrative fiction, Baudelaire’s poetics of conjecture nevertheless relates more to the combination of clarity and mysteriousness that he identifies in Poe’s poetry, as also in Gautier’s. For Baudelaire, melancholy is omnipresent in Gautier’s work but mitigated by the consoling power of his verbal imagination and an ability to present in perfect definition a world inviting conjecture. In his 1861 essay on Hugo Baudelaire commends a similar poetics of conjecture, rejecting the portentous poet-lawgiver and praising the poet of mystery, not the prophet who has all the answers but the poet who prompts us to seek them.