Multitude, solitude: when the poet turns out to be a reader in the boundaries of reason

Abstract

The request to the reader is a central element in the constitution of Charles Baudelaire’s poetics. In some of the prose poems collected in the posthumous title Le Spleen de Paris, the relationship between the poet and the reader seems to be established through the staging of the poetic persona as a reader pushed to the boundaries of reason. This article aims to point out some aspects of the dramatization of the poet as an interpreter who sometimes fails before reality, faced with his own inability to decipher it. We will start by reading the prose poem “Les Foules” by Baudelaire, the short story “The Man of the Crowd”, by Edgar Allan Poe, translated by the poet, and excerpts from Les Paradis artificiels, trying to examine the relationship between the words “solitude” and “multitude” and a certain fluidity or indeterminacy of meaning. It is intended, therefore, to point out how the representation of the poet as an exegete, not always successful, may be operating in the construction of what could be called Baudelaire’s “poetics of contradiction”.