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| | Charles Baudelaire - analysis |
 | | The first section, entitled "Spleen et idèal," opens with a series of poems that dramatize contrasting views of art, beauty, and the artist, who is depicted alternately as martyr, visionary, performer, pariah, and fool. |
 | | The focus then shifts to sexual and romantic love, with the first-person narrator of the poems oscillating between extremes of ecstasy ("idèal") and anguish ("spleen") as he attempts to find fulfillment through a succession of women whom it is possible, if simplistic, to identify with Jeanne Duval, Apollonie Sabatier, and Marie Daubrun. |
 | | Yet the attempt to find plenitude through love comes in the end to nothing, and "Spleen et idèal" ends with a sequence of anguished poems, several of them entitled "Spleen," in which the self is shown imprisoned within itself, with only the certainty of suffering and death before it. |
| www.veinotte.com /baudelaire/analysis.htm (1137 words) |
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