William Carlos Williams Review

Poets in Exile

Modernity’s grand narratives institute their own radical dismantling” (510). Susan Stanford Friedman’s conception of modernity in the previous sentence captures in miniature what many other critics have noted: modernity is overreaching, unstable, and, above all, contradictory.¹ Friedman’s conception of modernity also leads to understanding modernism as a form of “critical modernity,” which suggests rather than being the sanctioned aesthetic of modernity, as we might assume from its name, that modernism is modernity’s active, and radical, antagonist (Somigli 5). As Astradur Eysteinsson says in The Concept of Modernism, modernism is “an attempt to interrupt the modernity that we live and understand as a social, if not ‘normal,’ way of life” and is thus a “concept [ . . . ] signifying a paradigmatic shift, a major revolt, beginning in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, against the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world” (6, 2). Luca Somigli narrows Eysteinsson’s definition by arguing that modernism developed as a response to the “fallen condition of the poet in modernity” (9). In making this argument he refers to the example of Charles Baudelaire, and in particular Baudelaire’s prose poem “Lost Halo”—a text Somigli argues provides an allegory for the cultural crisis that poets faced in the latter half of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries.² With the “triumph of capitalist economy and positivist science” and the entrenchment and institutionalization of their attendant grand narratives, individuals who found themselves outside of those narratives were made to wonder who, what, and where they were (Somigli 7). Modernity, after all, if it is understood as a grand narrative (or multiple grand narratives), would seem to be offering solutions to the [End Page 55] problems of history. Modernity’s solutions, however, are necessarily exclusive. Baudelaire brings to the surface what these utopian projects have suppressed in their rise to ideological dominance, and what has ultimately been left out of their final solutions. The exclusion most significant for Baudelaire, of course, is that the poet, or at least the poet as he had been historically understood, seems to have no place in the projects of modernity.³

Baudelaire allegorizes the predicament of the modern poet with a story of a poet who loses his halo while crossing a busy boulevard. Another man, recognizing the halo-less poet in a “house of ill fame,” drinking “quintessences” and eating “ambrosia,” addresses the poet, and eventually asks whether or not the poet, in an attempt to get his halo back, will “put out a notice” or “have the police advertise for it.” The poet replies,

Good God no! I’m fine here. You’re the only one who recognized me. Besides, dignity irks me. And I’m glad to think that some bad poet will pick it up and insolently stick it on his head. Make someone happy, what a delight! And especially a happy someone I can laugh at! What about X, or Z! Right! Wouldn’t that be funny!

(Baudelaire 113)

Somigli argues that what Baudelaire lays bare in this text is that the “loss of the halo, the symbolic insignia of the poet’s social status and function, is the result of a transformation that pushes him to the margins of capitalist economy” (9). In Walter Benjamin’s terms, the poet, a remnant of precapitalist society, is evacuated of his aura. This has real benefits according to Baudelaire, in that the poet is now able to come into contact with cultural realms from which his halo had previously kept him apart; however, these contacts come at the price of his public voice. No longer do poets have an exalted place from which to speak; lacking their haloes, nothing now sanctions their voices other than that which sanctions everything in modernity: money. Baudelaire’s prose poem thus enacts in miniature, as Marshall Berman points out, the historical development that Marx and Engels describe in The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer...