Ross Chambers, Beyond Baudelaire: In Defence of (Transloitering) Poetry

Abstract

Ross Chambers's life-long love letter to nineteenth-century French literature and poetry starts with Gerard de Nerval et la poetique du voyage (1969), develops through hugely insightful and pioneering surveys such as Melancolie et opposition: Les Debuts du modernisme en France (1987) as well as innumerable articles on Baudelaire and others, and reaches its apex with his masterful last book-length essay An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise (2015), which has already become a classic within Baudelaire studies, and indeed beyond. The last of these works is a study that haunted Chambers for decades; it is -or at least it is a close relative of- one of those books 'that got away', all those brilliant unwritten ideas 'that sear the consciousness and cause sleep apnea in the lives of academics. (Incidentally, only someone like Ross Chambers could write such an eloquent and thought-provoking scholarly essay on things unsaid. A refreshing counter-example of internal intellectual life, in times of'research outputs', 'national benefit', 'impact statements'.)