Tuesday 12 February
5.15-6.30pm, Old Library, All Soul's College

Marie Daouda (Oriel) – ‘Baudelaire's desperate prayer - Hoping against Hugo’

Something has gone wrong in 1848. Following the Revolution, the fall of the Second Republkic and the institution of the Second Empire, Victor Hugo is exiled, and poets of the younger generation feel bereft of the revolutionary and the poetical ideal he embodied. Yet, his influence is all the more vivid that he still stood for a humanist ideal, merging a Rousseauist belief in innate human goodness and daring poetic experiments. If Baudelaire strives to emulate Hugo's ability to break the accepted aesthetical codes, his dissent towards the master crystalises around the idea of original sin. 

My aim is to show to what extent Baudelaire's despair faces the problem of evil by admitting it as part of a wider harmony, which he dissociates from Nature, and in which he sees a matchless balance of the opposites. Baudelaire's metaphysics, indebted to Pascal and Joseph de Maistre, admit the pit, the splenetic void, as a space for despair, but in which the poet's desperate prayer enters in a contemplative dialogue with the ideal. 

Jessica Rushton (Oriel) – ‘An exploration of olfaction in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud’

Smells, perfumes, odours and stenches emanate from the works of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Olfaction is an indispensable component in the creation of their poetry. This paper begins with Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s poems which foreground disgusting smells in order to deal with the writing of poetry, society’s corruption and the notions of beauty. It then investigates the poems that deal more explicitly with perfume and its relation to memory and the imagination. This paper will also reveal why the theme of olfaction is rarely the central focus in scholarship devoted to two extensively studied poets, despite Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s unmistakeable foregrounding of olfaction in their poetry.