Baudelaire against the grain:

uture versus modern in Haroldo de Campos’s critique

Abstract

At various times, concrete poetry was criticized for omissions or exclusions within the repertoire it sought to defend, particularly when it seemed to overlook some of the most paradigmatic poets of modern poetry. Augusto Massi, for instance, emphasizes the absence of Charles Baudelaire as revealing of the group’s actions. The French poet, however, plays a significant role, though not as a protagonist, in one of Haroldo de Campos’s best-known texts: “Poesia e modernidade: da morte da arte à constelação. O poema pós-utópico”. In the reasoning developed in the essay, Baudelaire is responsible for carrying out the experience of modernity in its negative vocation. On the other hand, Stéphane Mallarmé, already “post-modern”, is capable of announcing the future through a syntactic and epistemological revolution. Contrasting Mallarmé with Baudelaire serves to reiterate the values of the avant-garde and project a certain poetics for the future, even though the essay declares the “end of the avant-gardes”. In this sense, the present work suggests that, in Haroldo de Campos’s hands, a reading of Baudelaire is produced. It focuses more on the author of Les Fleurs du Mal than on that of Spleen de Paris and is marked by a Brazilian context of reading Baudelaire’s work, associated with poetics that the concrete poets considered outdated. Moreover, to opt for another “revolution”, Baudelaire is confined within the limits of “modernity” and the “Hugoan revolution”.