Critical Summaries

• The "heresy of didactism [in art]" and its corollaries: heresies "of passion, of truth and morality" (203). Suggests these occur in overabundance in the poetry of antiquity. Advocates l'art pour l'art
• The paradox of modernism, in forms that will later be somewhat echoed by De Man: Progress as a mere refinement of sensual pleasure that sharpens suffering--"a conquest lost again at every minute, a form of progress that is a constant negation of itself" (194); exalts the "primitive man" as displaying "an inventive faculty that we have long since lost": "Can we really compare our lazy eyes and our stopped-up ears to those eyes that pierce the mist, to those ears that could hear the grass growing?" (196)
• The unity of the moral, aesthetic, and spiritual senses in art, especially poetry (204-205) -- but also the virtues of distinguishing, as Poe does, "intellect, taste, and moral sense" (198)
• Poetry as about the aspiration to a higher (spiritual) form of beauty--205
• The poet's heightened irritability, as derived from sensitivity--quotes Poe--201
• Poe's "perfection of the structure" (198) through rhyme, rhythm and "[adapting] [these] to feeling"--"making means correspond with effects" (202); Poe "add[ed] a new element to [rhyme]": "strangeness, which is like the indispensable condiment of all beauty (207) . . . Baud. stresses re: formal details that "there are no minutiae" in poetry (206)
• Poe's notion of the imagination as queen of the faculties: able to apprehend "the secret relation of things, of the correspondences and analogies" in a way that philosophy cannot--199
• Relative merits of short story vs. poem qua medium--199-200
• Poe's and Baud.'s rejection of long or "epic" poems: these lack "unity of impression" and fail to "ravish[] the soul" in an as immediate way as short poetry--202

Personally interesting: Baud. quotes a long tirade of Poe against American women's large purses: "like giant cucumbers [...] [The purse] must be capacious enough for her to be able to put her money, all her money -- and her whole soul -- into it!" (196)

Baudelaire, Charles, and P E. Charvet. Selected Writings on Art and Artists [of] Baudelaire. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Print.