Letters from Wade's Inferno
Letters from Wade's Inferno
Charles Baudelaire at 200 (Ici C'est Paris)
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Charles Baudelaire at 200 (Ici C'est Paris)

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, PLAYING THE LONG GAME AND THIS IS PARIS Spoken-word poem written for the bicentenial of Charles Baudelaire's birth. I hope you enjoy, and bon anniversaire, Charles.

Image: Firefighters stand at an entrance and look at the fire damage inside the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, L Monde, Monday April 15, 2019.

He's been called the father of modernism, the laureate of decadence and decay, the first true urban poet, 'la Roi de Poetes' by Arthur Rimbaud, 'the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language' by T.S. Eliot, and Oscar Wilde, Francis Bacon and Pete Doherty have all marked his influence.

April 2021 was the 200 anniversary of his birth; Charles Baudealire's unflinching ability to contend with life's ugliness and the sheer agony of being human has never failed to resonate with me, and this aesthetic pertains to our troubled times as much as to his own.

For my part, he is among the gods of poetry and so saluting his ghost with this poem was my privilege.

‘Seldom have we seen the natural solemnity of a great city depicted with more poetic power: the majesty of the piles of stone; those spires pointing their fingers to the sky; the obelisks of industry vomiting legion of smoke against the heavens; the enormous scaffolds of the monuments under repair, pressing the spider-web-like and paradoxical beauty of their structure against the monuments' solid bodies; the steamy sky, pregnant with rage and heavy with rancour; and the wide vistas whose poetry resides in the dramas with which one endows them in one's imagination - none of the complex elements that compose the painful and glorious décor of civilization has been forgotten.’

  • Charles Baudelaire, from an essay praising the Charles Meryon

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Letters from Wade's Inferno
Letters from Wade's Inferno
Letters from Wade's Inferno is a monthly podcast from Irish author Daniel Wade. In each episode he brings you a poem, an essay, exerpts from works in progress, prose fiction, or just general musings, with an introduction.
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