SOURCE: "Poet as Passant: Baudelaire's 'Holy Prostitution,'" in Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, pp. 39-56.

In the following chapter from a longer work, Sharpe examines how the "Parisian Sketches" section of Les Fleurs du Mal transforms the urban experience into a metaphor for the poetic process.

Although Blake and Wordsworth begin the poetic exploration of the apocalyptic modern metropolis, the unreal city of the nineteenth century finds its laureate in Baudelaire. Baudelaire's poetry is revolutionary because it insists on the motley splendor of the entire city and all its inhabitants, no matter how bizarre, perverse, or degraded. Baudelaire dedicates himself to creating a new, comprehensive urban aesthetic that can take in "tous les hôpitaux et . . . tous les palais." Previously, only Blake had consistently seen the city as a vast, interlocking system of social forces that possessed...