“The Swan” by Charles Baudelaire
Allegory, Transparency and Opacity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-2096.2025.53380Keywords:
Charles Baudelaire, french poetry, image, allegory, transparency, opacityAbstract
We point out the belonging of the poem “The Swan” to the intersemiotic aesthetics of Parisian Scenes, section incorporated into the second edition of The Flowers of Evil (1861) succinctly highlighting its pictorial indexes. Next, we highlight the presence of a transparency-opacity dialectic in the process of image composition described in The Painter of Modern Life. It is then postulated that such dialectic is constitutive of allegory, a structuring figure of the Baudelairean poem, in which referential and significant elements are combined in the construction of a picture, sometimes transparent and sometimes opaque, of Haussmannian Paris. Finally, it is proposed that the material conditions of transparency and opacity, in the poem, are related to the context of political violence, artistic censorship and urban exclusion perpetrated by the Second Empire. Theoretically, Louvel, Didi-Huberman, Alloa and Hansen are used.
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