The introduction to this volume presents each of Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire in chronological order. Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flâneur he went to the market to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flâneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well.
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