Creating from Nothing: Swinburne and Baudelaire in "Ave Atque Vale" (Algernon Charles Swinburne, Charles Baudelaire‪)‬

Algernon Charles Swinburne was among the earliest English critics to praise Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (1857). Writing in the Spectator for September 1862, Swinburne stresses the volume's "delight in problems": The references to the embracing of suffering and physical disgust evoke the public scandal and legal action occasioned by Les Fleurs du Mal in which Baudelaire caught the tension between the horror and the ecstasy of life. What Swinburne recognizes is that the shock of these ideas derives from the clash of opposites--suffering asks us to consider the question of pleasure just as disgust asks us to consider the question of vivid sensuous awareness. Baudelaire knew that these questions persist as questions, and Swinburne is aware that delighting in them is the mark of the Frenchman's genius--"Ave Atque Vale" is farewell to the mortal Baudelaire and hail to his vibrant verse.