Baudelaire’s Swan

To read T. S. Eliot’s 1930 essay ‘Baudelaire’, that introduces a translation of Intimate Journals, is to be thrown back into a very different literary era, especially now when the whole idea of introductions seems to have fallen out of favour with major publishers. (Some notion perhaps that they interfere with the pure and unmediated response of readers?) Beyond that, what’s striking is the assured, authoritative tone and the poet’s depth of knowledge of a foreign language and culture. It was written the year Eliot published ‘Ash Wednesday’, and is the work of a poet in full and confident maturity, after a long and searching familiarity with an œuvre that had signally influenced his own development