Uh-oh.

Looks like the Korrektiv has something of a literary forebear:

The term poete maudit, or “cursed poet,” was coined by Paul Verlaine.  His little book Les poetes maudits (1884) interleaved his own honorific prose with poems by some of the poets he most esteemed but whose very greatness assured that they were known only to the cognoscenti.  It was their obscurity – society was indifferent to them because they were hard to understand – that prompted Verlaine to speak of them as cursed. This cultivated sense of neglect, even oppression, at the hands of the bourgeois philistines became the classic pose of the avant-garde.

But the curse seemed to be as much moral and spiritual as social, contributing to the presumption that a true artist must suffer agonies of genius…The paradigmatic poete maudit was Baudelaire (1821-67).  His Les fleurs du mal (1857), or The Flowers of Evil, is the most famous book of nineteenth-century  French poetry and one of the most famous in world literature. The poems, which were revolutionary in their intermixtures of the sordid and the beautiful, reflected a spiritual extremity that the modern era has long savored, one both hell-bent and heaven storming.

– Opening of the essay “The Cursed Poets and Their Gods” by Algis Valiunas in the February 2012 First Things

(Emphasis mine.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog