Baudelaire, Vischer, and Self-Transforming Empathy

This article proposes to situate what it will show be Charles Baudelaire's bi-directional empathy with objects in relation his move away from Romanticism towards Modernism. It that self-transforming receptiveness the outside world is at least as central aesthetic any self-projecting transformation of world. The consider poet's presentation identification objects, poems "La Cloche fêlée," Musique," and "Le Flacon," light early thinking about by Robert Vischer others, then briefly more recent work on theme. argue inscriptions confrontation between self non-self reveal Baudelaire an thinker a kind empathy, which both Modernism theorists whose was so influential for