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More Seductive Than Phryne: Baudelaire, Gérôme, Rilke, and the Problem of Autonomous Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Judith Ryan
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Abstract

Rilke's poem “Die Flamingos” turns on a curious image in which exotic birds are compared to the Greek courtesan Phryne. By tracing the development of the Phryne motif in Baudelaire's poems “Lesbos” and “La beauté” and in Gérôme's painting Phryné devant l'Aréopage, this essay argues that Rilke's poem takes issue with the notion of autonomous art and with the aestheticist cult of beauty, for which the motif had come to stand. “Die Flamingos” not only breaks with the idea that art and aura are necessarily linked but also questions the ability of Baudelairean allegory to restore poetic wholeness. In so doing, the poem represents not a continuation of the nineteenth-century “art for art's sake” movement but a final phase in the complex history of aestheticist self-questioning.

Type
Cluster on the Poetic: From Euripides to Rich
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 5 , October 1993 , pp. 1128 - 1141
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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