Politics of the modern form

Abstract

Since romanticism is fundamental to Antonio Cândido's work, especially his Formação da literatura brasileira, we try in this article, based on Baudelaire and Mallarmé, to relocate some of the problems posed by romanticism and perhaps define a post-romanticism that would allow us to rethink the political function of form, especially in poetry. We will start with the exemplary way in which Mallarmé's reception raised the problems of the relation between form and politics, and then define Baudelaire's lyricism and the place his poetry occupies in the symbolic destruction of the cultural basis of romanticism. Baudelaire's opposition between classic and modern can lead us to redraw the importance of the irruption of the “horrible life” or prose or the “intensity of life” in his poetry in order to rewrite another history of lyricism.