Ecopoetic Ruminations in Baudelaire's 'Je n'ai pas oublié' and 'La Servante au grand cœur'

Daniel Finch-Race

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)
3 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

‘Je n’ai pas oublié’, the ninety-ninth poem in the second edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1861), involves the narrator reminiscing about his impoverished childhood in his mother’s small house near Paris. In the following piece, ‘La Servante au grand cœur’, the narrator suggests to his mother that they should take flowers to the tomb of his nursemaid, whose nigh forgotten body lies beside other neglected corpses suffering the passage of the seasons. These two vignettes of memory highlight a burgeoning awareness of new prosodic and ecological systems, making them ripe for ecopoetic analysis. This article suggests that the evocation of Baudelaire’s modest pre-metropolitan existence offers the key to understanding the diminished human and non-human presences that figure in the surrounding 16 poems of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ series, marked by the melancholic metrocentrism that suffuses Baudelaire’s later poetry.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)170-184
Number of pages15
JournalGreen Letters
Volume19
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2015

Keywords

  • city/cities, poverty, transience, childhood, French versification, ecopoetry

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Ecopoetic Ruminations in Baudelaire's 'Je n'ai pas oublié' and 'La Servante au grand cœur''. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this