Many strategies for incorporating poetry into non-poetry classes, especially outside of English and associated disciplines, appear to make poetry subservient and secondary in relation to the prose content of the course. The poet under consideration becomes a kind of involuntary servant to one or more prose authors, forced to "speak only when spoken to," and effectively prevented from challenging the ideas of the course’s prose writers, and thereby the instructor. Fortunately, this is not the only strategy for incorporating poetry into prose-dominated courses. In this chapter, I will suggest an alternate approach which recognizes and facilitates the agency of poets and poetry per se, which I term "empowering poetic defiance." In brief, this approach consists of the following four steps:

(1) challenge one’s own poetic self-loathing

(2) position the course’s poetry’s content to challenge the course’s non-poetic contents

(3) position the course’s poetry’s forms to challenge your class’s non-poetic forms

(4) comport oneself as interlocutor toward the poets featured in the course as the

intellectual equals of oneself and the course’s prose writers.

My first section will elaborate on these four steps, and my second section will flesh out the method further with a new reading of one of the most powerfully defiant poets in the Western canon, the nineteenth-century French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, in dialogue with one of the most formidable challengers to the power of poetry, the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant.

I.Four-Steps to Poetic Defiance

I begin, as every theoretical dance should, with step one. The Western tradition, beginning with Plato’s exile of the dramatic poets from the Republic, is partially defined by a millennia-long history of self-loathing poets, who disavow their poetic identity and don the mask of prose scholar instead. Plato himself was a tragic poet before meeting Socrates, after which he burned all his poems. Yet at Plato’s death, a copy of Sappho’s lyric poetry was discovered under his pillow. Even as great and committed a poet as John Milton claimed, in the epilogue to his 1645 Poems, to have outgrown his own poetry (which he calls "vain trophies of my idleness") thanks to Plato’s "Academy’s Socratic streams." This poetic self-loathing can also be detected, as I will discuss below, in Baudelaire, despite his status as perhaps the greatest poet in French history. On a humbler note, for my own part, having written poetry for years before I began to study philosophy, I was heartbroken to learn, as an undergraduate, of Plato’s apparent contempt for the poets, and hurt by my colleagues and mentors’ dismissiveness toward philosophers writing poetry. To resist these pressures, I devoted my first dissertation to trying to rise to Plato’s challenge, in the Republic, and be the poet who someday proves the poets worthy of readmittance to his imaginary polis. And since virtually everyone has composed poetry, at least during childhood, instructors of prose-dominated courses should do some soul-searching before introducing poetry into those course, and ask whether they, too, have internalized this contempt for theorists drawn to verse.

For the second step, attempt to include, in the course’s poetic content, poetry which does not merely confirm the claims and perspectives already represented by the course’s prose content. For example, one can include writings by a poet which directly undermine one or more central claims from a prose writer featured in the course. Although one might object that this is unrealistically demanding for most instructors who are not well-versed in poetry, locating such moments of poetic undermining is actually quite easy. One merely needs to perform a basic search, on a literary database such as Project MUSE, for the poet and prose writers’ names. Perhaps the real obstacle is something like the instructor’s unconscious attempt to prevent the poetic text from doing anything more than buttressing the legitimacy or persuasiveness of a given prose text. That is, if the instructor is unfamiliar with a poetic writer’s divergence from a given prose writer, s/he may prefer not to know, and merely highlight any apparent convergence between the two. How else, in the present article’s example, can one explain the lack of comparative analysis between who are arguably the greatest Germanic philosopher and the greatest French poet?

Where the second step empowers poetry to problematize the content of the prose writings featured in a course, the third step involves problematizing the form of the prose writings (and also, by implication, the prose-based methodologies of the course’s academic discipline). The third step calls for featuring poetry that emphasizes—contra much prose scholarship and research—formal features characteristic of poetry contra prose. Important examples here include emotionally-charged language and rhetoric, first-person vantage points, and a willingness and ability to simultaneously affirm two or more claims that stand in logical tension or even contradiction. So intense are the effects of these formal characteristics of poetry that they often distract prose interpreters from realizing a poet and prose writer are even discussing the same content. As I will discuss below, this is frequently the case for Baudelaire and Kant, including in their shared emphasis on ethical and moral crises.

The fourth step, finally, is the organic result of having taken the first three. To treat a poet as intellectual equal to a prose writer presupposes (1) refraining from projecting one’s own intellectual insecurities onto the poet, as an unconscious excuse to keep the poet from even joining the conversation to begin with, (2) giving a fair hearing to even those claims by the poet which challenge the central premises and assumptions of prose-dominated debates, and (3) maintaining hermeneutic openness and charity towards characteristically poetic forms of discourse. Achieving and sustaining this egalitarian comportment toward a given poet is more difficult to the degree that the following traits tend to be attributed to the poet (corresponding to the first three steps of this method, respectively): (1) a hostility to theory per se, (2) a predilection for stances that (currently) unpopular in prose-dominated theoretical circles, and (3) a valorization of phenomena such as affect, first-personness, and illogic. In this light, the maximally egalitarian non-poetry instructor would be willing and able to incorporate into prose-dominated courses even a poet regarded as antitheoretical, antiestablishment, and/or antilogical. Enter Baudelaire, maximally defiant, quintessentially poetic, and taking aim at Kant, one of the least egalitarian prose theorists, in respect of the hierarchy of poetry and prose.

II. Baudelairean Flâneur Contra Kantian Critique

It would not be unreasonable to claim that Kant almost singlehandedly inaugurates intellectual modernity, by transforming philosophy into the absolute Critic, the central responsibility of whom is the segregation of religion from science. Religion on the right. Science gets what’s left. And the arts are nowhere to be seen, invisibly fomenting revolution.

As a poet candidate for the Ph.D. in Philosophy, one of my two Comprehensive Examination prompts concerned Kant. It read as follows: "Although he lived in the eighteenth century, did the nineteenth century truly belong to Kant?" Although I continue to have enormous respect for my three committee members who chose and affirmed this prompt, my first reaction to it was indignance. Was it not already problematic enough, I asked myself, that one prose writer is widely regarded as the dominant force of his entire century? Must we also concede to him the next hundred years, too, extending his discursive empire so far past his own grave?

Having studied German Idealism, I knew it is generally regarded as the most important school of thought in the nineteenth century, and one which is largely a footnote to Kant. I also knew that my committee members are largely sympathetic to this view, and thus inferred that the answer they expected from my comprehensive exam essay was a firm affirmative: the nineteenth century indeed belonged, qua Germanic-ally Ideal, to Kant. What seemed less clear, however, was how the answer might change if one were to take a broader view of the philosophy of that century, specifically inclusive of thinkers who are usually excluded from the canon for writing in poetry. With that century’s canon thus poetically expanded to its proper proportions, most of its thinkers fall into the (non-German Idealism) schools of French Symbolism, British Romanticism, and American Transcendentalism. At this point, the nineteenth century would initially appear to escape "belonging" to the "Sage of Königsberg."

Despite this initial appearance, however, I decided to linger for a while with the word "belonging" itself. Following Kant’s own predilection for Trinity-based triadic schematizations, I ultimately argued, in my essay response to the prompt, that one can meaningfully distinguish at least three different senses of the word "belonging," within each of which sense are three different modes of belonging, within each of which mode are three examples. This can be represented visually as follows:

(a) belonging "how"

(a1) linguistically(a2) historically(a3) comparatively

(a1a) mathematically (a2a) German Idealism (a3a) dark inertia

(a1b) etymologically (a2b) British Romanticism (a3b) passion

(a1c) genetically (a2b) Dark Romanticism (a3c) lucidity

(b) "who" belongs

(b1) nationalities(b2) schools(b3) writers

(b1a) French (b2a) Symbolism (b3a) Baudelaire

(b1b) U.S. American (b2b) Transcendentalism (b3b) Thoreau

(b1c) British (b2c) Utilitarianism (b3c) J. S. Mill

(c) "what" belongs

(c1) Kant’s three Critiques(c2) unfreedom-remainders(c3) unfreedom-symptoms

(c1a) epistemology (c2a) boredom (c3a) flâneur

(c1b) morality (c2b) slavery (c3b) hermit

(c1c) value theory (c2c) exhaustion (c3c) housewife

In the complete essay represented by this figure, I consider each of Kant’s three Critiques, in dialogue with Baudelaire, Thoreau, and J. S. Mill, respectively. In the present article, I focus exclusively on Baudelaire, as the only one of these three nineteenth century writers whose primary medium is poetry.

In regard to this figure, my reading of Baudelaire takes its orientation from the (a1) triad, which concern the linguistic "how" of belonging, and which derives from the discourse of mathematics, specifically set theory. As exploited (in every sense of the word) by the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou, "belonging" in set theory signifies that something is a member of a set. For example, the number 3 is a member of the set of whole numbers, and of the set of odd numbers (among an infinity of other actual and possible sets). This concept of belonging stands in contrast to the set theory concept of "inclusion," which signifies that one set belongs to another set. For example, the set of whole numbers is included in the set of integers. For Badiou, belonging corresponds to his concept of "presentation," while inclusion corresponds to his concept of "representation." When something is represented, in Badiou’s sense, that thing is presented as belonging; whereas when something belongs, it may not be also represented (i.e., presented as belonging.) For example, the number 40,000,000 belongs to the set of whole numbers, but it is not often explicitly acknowledged as belonging to that set. In this Badiou-based sense, I am claiming that Baudelaire is the nineteenth-century writer who "belongs" to Kant’s intellectual arena, while not being "included" therein, in that Baudelaire is not recognized and presented as occupying his actual location in Kant’s orbit.

To get a sense of part of what Kant meant to nineteenth-century thinkers such as Baudelaire, picture a guidebook, a how-to manual, on one of the oldest, commonest and most ineradicable of human activities. This guidebook, moreover, is so complex, so intimidating and so awkwardly written, that it has the following effects on its considerable audience: (1) many give up this activity altogether, (2) many more believe they have given it up, but continue to engage in it, in a kind of Freudian denial, and (3) most of those who do continue the activity, willfully and consciously, are filled with guilt, shame and despair. Moreover, even the guidebook’s author never manages, and perhaps for the same reasons as his readers, to complete his own contribution to this endeavor, after having published his preliminary book on method. We know, however, from that book on method, that the author did in fact have a tentative title for his contribution, namely Metaphysics of Nature.

I have described this non-hypothetical situation incompletely thus far, however, for I have so far included only the prose philosophers, for most of whom only one of the guidebook’s two central theoretical endeavors—metaphysics—has central importance. The other central discourse—mathematics—is naturally more important for those working in the medium that is the marriage of philosophy and mathematics, especially by way of music, namely lyric poetry.

This additional audience, the poet-philosophers (who are customarily referred to by only the first part of their name), must therefore also deal with Kant’s first Critique’s treatment of mathematics. In the latter, Kant sets mathematics on roughly as unprecedented and unwanted a path as that on which he set metaphysics. The contemporary philosophy of mathematics terms this path "constructivism."

In a nutshell, Kant argues that the same "Reason" which discovers the truths of philosophy actually creates mathematical truths, and that these mathematical truths, upon creation, become part of the fabric of the inter-subjective world of appearances. Thus, the metaphysicians, who historically have almost always insisted on creating, after Kant are essentially rendered infertile. And the mathematicians—who for the most part, if given to metaphysical speculation at all, have considered themselves discoverers of truth, after Kant are transformed into magicians. More specifically, in a claim more counterintuitive even than any in his first Critique, Kant elsewhere defines the mathematicians. "Mathematics," he writes, "is pure poetry."

For a poet concerned with the subject matter of metaphysics, and there is arguably no other kind, the above information would have to be bewildering, perhaps even more so than for the prose philosophers. If taken seriously, it would entail a diremption for the poet into the strange psychic bedfellows of infertile metaphysician and fabricating mathematician, since the former supplies the content of lyric poetry, while the latter supplies its content. Taking one final imaginative step, if one were to picture a poet after Kant, lingering with the tension of these claims long enough to produce a poetic reductio ad absurdum of them, in which the mathematical form of the poetry creates a space for a metaphysical content raging against its own futility, the result would be the actuality of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil and The Spleen of Paris.

I have hinted above at the intellectual kinship between Kant and Baudelaire, but it would perhaps be advisable to make it more explicit, albeit briefly. Baudelaire was a disciple, and acclaimed translator, of Edgar Allen Poe, who oriented himself in opposition to the New England Transcendentalists, who derived their philosophical program from Coleridge, who by way of the German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling with a disciple of Kant. Thus, insofar as Baudelaire sided with the "Dark Romantic" Poe against the (bright?) "Romantic" Schelling, Baudelaire can be fruitfully placed in a position of oppositional indebtedness to Kant.

Having telescoped this genealogy, I turn now to the text of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. According to its first poem, the largest flower in this garden, the greatest of all evils, is "Boredom" [Ennui]. Dedicated to the "Hypocrite reader—my semblance—my brother!" the speaker of this first poem claims that, of the "monsters" "of our vices / There is one most ugly, nasty and foul!", the "delicate monster" of boredom. The word ennui, and its associated parts of speech, appear many times in The Flowers of Evil, including five times in the longest poem of the book, "The Voyage" (to which I will return below). And if one accepts the editor’s footnote claim that the word "spleen" "meant boredom to the Romantics," then ennui also becomes, by logical substitution, the title of another poem in the collection (the theme of which is, aptly, boredom). Boredom also becomes, by this same substitution, part of the title of The Spleen of Paris.

The word "Ennui" first recurs in the second line of the second poem, "Benediction." According to its speaker, "by a decree of the powers, supreme, / The Poet appears in this bored world." "Ennui" appears a second time in the poem in line 45, which describes how the poet’s wife has finally bored herself with "impious farces" calculated to make the poet worship her as a god (resorting to physical violence against the poet instead). The boredom of terrestrial existence is the subject matter of the fourth poem, "Rise," which in that way hearkens back to the third poem, "The Albatross," which is probably the best-known in the entire collection.

In three stanzas, "The Albatross" describes the crew of a ship who capture and bind on deck an albatross which has been following the ship in its voyage. The bird, a majestic "king of the blue" in the sky, becomes "comic and ugly," its "large white wings" described as "oars dragging at their sides" while grounded aboard ship. The fourth stanza makes an analogy between the albatross and the poet in the world which suggests that the world in question is that of the post-Kantian nineteenth century in particular:

The Poet: semblance of prince of the clouds

Haunts tempest, makes light of the archer;

Exiled on the soil in a booing milieu,

His giant’s wings disallow walking.

The poetic albatross here, like the poets in the wake of Kant’s first Critique, finds himself banished from his home in the sky, the "beauty of the air" that could be the original derivation Baudelaire’s family name. This seafaring imagery also calls to mind one of the most poetic passages of the first Critique, near the end of the "Transcendental Analytic" (Kant’s constructive account of reason’s theoretical employment), and right before the "Transcendental Dialectic" (Kant’s negative account of reason’s overreaching theoretical employment). There, Kant compares the properly critiqued reason to "an island," which Kant terms "the land of truth—enchanting name!" The passage continues as follows:

surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion."

Kant’s point here is that the theoretical "island" circumscribed by his Critique is the only stable, inhabitable home of metaphysical speculation, all others being illusory or at best temporary. Baudelaire’s poet, however, does not want to be arrested on any terra whatsoever, firma or otherwise. The poet wants the clouds.

The story told by the poem "The Albatross" is also virtually identical to the beginning of another poem about an albatross, which is also Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most famous poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In Coleridge’s text, an old sailor recounts to a guest at a wedding how he shot down an albatross that (like Baudelaire’s) had been following his ship, after which violence all manner of horrible punishment was wreaked upon the crew, of whom the titular mariner is the sole survivor. Though his crew initially blamed the mariner for killing the bird "that made the breeze to blow," they later cheered him for killing the bird which also "brought the fog and mist." Ultimately, however, the bird’s death leaves the ship in an utter and deadly calm, incapable of movement. After days without water, the rest of the crew is taken by "Death," while the mariner is taken instead by what Coleridge terms "Life-In-Death." Only after the mariner prays for forgiveness for his violence does the "spell" of the motionless sea cease, followed by a series of events that end with him alive on shore, but cursed with an intermittent compulsion to wander the earth, telling his story to strangers like the now-horrified wedding guest.

As observed by the editors of a Norton anthology including "Ancient Mariner," Coleridge’s poem begins with a long quote in Latin from the seventeenth century theologian Thomas Burnet. In a text entitled Archaeologiae Philosophiae, as summarized by the Norton editors, Burnet discusses his belief in "invisible beings" about which "the human mind has always circled without attaining knowledge." Burnet concludes that, although one must "watch for the truth" in order to "avoid extremes," it is nevertheless sometimes "well for the soul to contemplate the image of a larger and better world, lest the mind, habituated to the small concerns of daily life, limit itself too much and sink entirely into trivial thinking." Thus, Coleridge’s poem is an allegory for the dangers of a project like Kant’s first Critique. And Coleridge, though a Kantian of sorts, sides on this issue with Baudelaire and the albatross. Though it is admittedly frightening to wander endlessly without a home, and here Coleridge agrees with Baudelaire, it is "Life-In-Death," a kind of perpetual ennui, to destroy that which joyfully wanders amid the clouds—the poet qua metaphysician.

Returning to The Flowers of Evil, after "The Albatross" Baudelaire examines, in painful detail, the provenance of the poet restricted to the propositions of natural science (including unfortunately unforgettable odes such as "The Carrion"), before returning to the theme of boredom. In "The Broken Bell," the speaker compares his soul to the poem’s title, a "cloche fêlée" with an "enfeebled voice." The adjective for "broken" here in French, fêlée, can also mean "crazy" (in something close to the way that F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, writes of someone "cracking up"). Here, one can see again the poet after Kant, who in this metaphor is no longer the healthy bell that rings true (as in premodern Western societies), but instead a broken, dysfunctional, or crazy bell that can only mumble feebly. Immediately following "The Broken Bell" is the poem "Spleen," which scathingly indicts the boredom that appears to crack up the poet-as-bell into insanity.

After "Spleen" comes "The Voyage," whose speaker claims that, "in memory’s eyes the world is small," and that astrologers "are intoxicated / with space and the light of skies burning," in order for the astrologers "not to be changed into beasts." The speaker, like Kant in the above block quote, discusses poring over maps, and describes each island thereon as "an Eldorado" which "The Imagination that draws up its orgy / Finds nothing but a sandbar." The speaker explains the desire to voyage as a means to "enliven the boredom of our prisons" which nevertheless leaves us "often bored, as here [on land]" with "the boring spectacle of immortal sin," and which "always, makes us see our own image: an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." The poem ends with the speaker imploring Death to "Plunge us to the bottom of the abyss, Hell or Heaven, what’s it matter? / To the bottom of the Unknown to find the new!"

Finally, in the next to last poem, "The Abyss," Baudelaire references the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. In the poem’s last line, having just described his mind’s vertigo and longing for nothingness, the speaker exclaims as follows: "Ah! No never to be at the end of Numbers and Beings!" Thus, here at the end of the first section of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, one finds again numbers and being, mathematics and metaphysics, as well as the two primary subjects of Kant’s first Critique, creatively united by Baudelaire in a mathematically beautiful expression of metaphysical rage.

Immediately after this last conventional poem, in Feltham’s combined edition of The Flowers of Evil and The Spleen of Paris, Baudelaire does in a sense come to "the end of Numbers." As indicated in its subtitle, Poems in Prose, the mathematical meter and rhymed verse of The Flowers of Evil comes to its end. These prose poems, unlike the verse poems and their ungainly albatross, are able to walk comfortably and beautifully. It is through these prose poems, finally, that I will briefly consider the flaneur, interpreted as Baudelaire’s philosophical challenge to the Kantian metaphysical boredom that afflicted the nineteenth century.

The prose poem "Each his Chimera" is an allegory, with a group of men who are walking bent over double, but cheerfully, under the active weight of their illusions, which are personified as the titular "chimeras." The poem concludes with the speaker naming his own chimera as "Indifference." Here I identify see a crucial transition, from the angst-born paralysis of The Flowers of Evil, to the The Spleen of Paris’ superficial and indifferent strolling flâneur, who first appears several poems later.

In the meantime, the next poem, "The Bad Window-Glazier," offers a psychological analysis of bored and repressed natures, who compensate by striking out in compulsive acts of joyful violence. Interestingly, though called "Bad," the titular glazier turns out to be the innocuous victim of violence, rather than its perpetrator. The subsequent poem, "The Masses," is probably the original textual basis of the flanéur, though the word does not appear in the poem. The speaker of "The Masses" asserts that "to enjoy the crowd is an art," that the "walker solitary and pensive draws a singular intoxication from that universal communion," and that this walking amounts to the walker "adopt[ing] as his own all the professions." Even more approvingly, the speaker claims that "That which men name love is small, restrained and feeble, indeed, compared to that ineffable orgy, to that saintly prostitution of the soul." Reinforcing this apparent oxymoron, "saintly prostitution," is the later poem, "Intoxicate Yourself," insofar as the specific intoxicants the speaker recommends are "wine, poetry or virtue." From this, it seems clear that one should not merely assume Baudelaire is the simplistic decadent or degenerate of his caricature. On the contrary, as for Kant, ethics and morality are of central importance. The difference is not one of category, or even of intensity, but rather what Nietzsche calls a revaluation of values.

Finally from The Spleen of Paris, it ends with a poem entitled, in English, "Any Where Out of the World," which Edgar Allen Poe later featured in his essay on literary composition, "The Poetic Principle." "I have the impression," the poem’s speaker says, "that I would always be comfortable there where I am not, and this question of moving is one I am endlessly discussing with myself." The rest of the poem is a dialogue between the speaker and his soul, attempting to find out where he should go to be happy. His soul remains silent, however, until its "explosion" in the last line of the entire book: "Doesn’t matter where! Provided it is outside this world!" Relatedly, in Kant’s first Critique, in a section called "The Antinomy of Pure Reason," Kant defines "the world" as "the mathematical sum-total of appearances and the totality of their synthesis." Perhaps it is for something like an escape from this boring post-Kantian world, from endless mere appearances, that Baudelaire fights.

Like his fellow nineteenth-century writers Thoreau and Mill, Baudelaire is centrally concerned with issues of freedom, which Kant called the "keystone" of his entire philosophy—the gravity underneath his Copernican revolution of thought, the force whereby the Self in Western philosophy joins Brahman at the helm of reality. But in the century following Kant’s three Critiques, as my reading of Baudelaire suggests, the freedom Kant claims to offer appears insufficient, bearing a harsh remainder of unfreedom. For Thoreau, the morality of Kant’s second Critique, granting freedom only to those understood to be rational beings, results in a world of mental slavery for one race of rational beings, whose resulting maxims entail the chattel slavery of an entire other race. For J. S. Mill, the value theory of Kant’s third Critique, with its insistence on a detached, disinterested appreciation through the free play of the faculties, gets transformed by its application into a new ethics of either stasis or nervous exhaustion, resulting in a world, half of whose population is condemned by their gender to a kind of lifelong house arrest. And for Baudelaire, as I have tried to show above, the epistemology of Kant’s first Critique, in drastically limiting our certain knowledge to the natural sciences, results in profound boredom for communities forced consider metaphysical questions at their leisure.

Put differently, Baudelaire captures, through the flâneur, the restlessness of a mind trapped in a world whose boundaries have already been rigidly defined by Kantian minds. And in this restless walking, also prominent in Thoreau and Mill, I detect a symptom of this lingering Kantian unfreedom, in connection to the most famous aspect of Kant’s own practice: his methodical daily walks. (His Königsberg neighbors famously joked that these walks were so rigidly timed that they could set their clocks based on the time that he passed by their houses). In Baudelaire’s case, the bored flâneur’s walk is a restless search for the stimulation denied to poetic thought by Kant’s critical philosophy. Baudelaire’s flâneur reunites what Kant divides in his first Critique, including the division between theoretical reason and practical reason, theory and practice, Kant’s philosophical theories and his practice of walking.

As in the narratives of Hindu thought, the world progresses through cycles of destruction and creation, collapse and rebirth, dissociation and re-socialization. Returning to my above figure of "belonging," the nineteenth century takes the threads Kant has explored through teasing them apart (like Hinduism’s three psychophysical components of dark inertia, passion and lucidity), and prepares the way for major projects of reunion in the twentieth century—organized labor, civil rights, and women’s liberation. For Baudelaire, like Thoreau, Mill, and Kant, walking is vital to his practice. But unlike Kant, Baudelaire (along with Thoreau and Mill) also articulates walking as a vital theme in his writing. He does so, moreover, specifically in relation to the Kantian theme of freedom. In Baudelaire, walking is both theorized and practiced, walking toward what was missing in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the practice of freedom.

III.Conclusion

I will now briefly recapitulate my method of "empowering poetic defiance," paraphrased in terms of the insights from my preceding interpretation of Baudelaire. Beginning with the first step, though I have written poetry since I was a child, and written seriously and published since undergrad days, I wrote very little poetry during my seven years of grad school in philosophy. This was not only due to the extreme workload, and stress, both of which were actually worse me during my subsequent three years of adjunct teaching (at three schools simultaneously). Yet I still produced much more poetry as an adjunct that during grad school. I attribute the latter decreased output to a pervasive ambiance of contempt in both of my graduate programs toward philosophers writing poetry. This, despite many of my professors and peers claiming, with apparent sincerity, to have a high regard for poets and poetry. Their objection, I eventually concluded, was the blurring of boundaries between philosophy and poetry, perceived as properly divided along the Kantian lines of concepts versus sensations. From this perspective, since I had enrolled in a Ph.D. in Philosophy program, I had decided in favor of concepts, and thus should not waste my creative intellectual energies on the sensations to which philosophy reduces poetry. In short, I now believe I was then experiencing a period of poetic self-loathing. The overcoming of that self-loathing was thus a necessary condition for, among other things, the present article and its interpretation of Baudelaire vis-à-vis Kant.

The second step of empowering poetic defiance is represented in my above interpretation of Baudelaire by enabling the propositional content of his poetry (i.e. that in his writing which can be translated or paraphrased into prose) to enter a conflictual dialogue with the prose of Kant’s first Critique. The difficulty here lay in being willing and able to treat Baudelaire’s and Kant’s claims as applying to the same world (in an ontological sense), or the same reality. The dominant approach in theoretical circles, by contrast, seems to assume that poetic writings map almost exclusively to imaginary and emotional arenas, while assuming that prose philosophical writings map onto an arena inclusive of the actual and rational. In this method, however, when Kant and Baudelaire write of "vice," "evil," "art," etc., one proceeds from the strategic assumption that they are writing of shared phenomena in a shared world.

The third step is represented in my above interpretation of Baudelaire by an attentiveness to the formal dimensions of his writings, including the mathematics involved in the conventional poetry of The Flowers of Evil and the major shift from that to the prose poetry of The Spleen of Paris. One insight from this attentiveness is that poetry is both capable of much greater formal precision (to the point of counting and measuring each syllable in each poem), while also being much more flexible, in that it can disguise its poetic intent and craft in what appear to be mere prose paragraphs and short stories. In the latter case, moreover, poetry can tap into the considerable powers of articulation and expression unique to narrative fiction. Whereas almost all philosophers writing in prose deny themselves this genre.

Finally, the fourth step is represented in my above interpretation by a refusal to dismiss Baudelaire qua thinker. It was a refusal to pretend that I have no obligation, as an interpreter of the most important Germanic philosopher of the eighteenth century, to attend to the response to Kant by the most important French poet of the nineteenth century. There is much at stake in this type of decision, both intellectually and professionally, for present-day instructors of prose-dominated courses. Because poets often question, mock and eviscerate academic theorists’ deepest assumptions, and explore phenomena that continue to be frowned upon in most academic theoretical circles, wherein instructors seek employment, tenure, and advancement (not to mention collegial respect and community). The obligation, and the attendant risk, are real.

In short, to practice this method of empowering poetic defiance, we as instructors in prose-dominated courses must be willing to empower ourselves, and to seek empowerment from likeminded others, in order to practice some significant defiance of our own. If we do not wish the invaluable differences and singularities of these rebellious poetic voices, views, and perspectives to pass from our world, then we must be willing to risk performing their rebelliousness, rather than just admiring that rebellion from the safety of our academic conformism. And we risk doing more harm by incorporating into our courses watered-down poetry from tamed poets, than we would by letting the poets continue to stand proudly, outside our ivory tower windows, in the sharp relief of their defiance. Instead, let us join our fellow poets, in solidarity with their defiance of the unfreedom we continue to become. For this unfreedom we unwittingly spread to our beloved students, who most deserve from us freedom.

References

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