Pictorical metapoetry: Baudelacroix

Abstract

The problematic relationship between text and image haunted Charles Baudelaire throughout his life. Conceptions of image’s poetry and poetry’s image are a major concern of the poet who establishes the concept of “modernity”, manifesting especially in the sonnet “On Tasso in Prison” - a tribute to the famous Delacroix’s painting about the Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544- 95). Intertextual echoes between the poetry of Baudelaire and Delacroix’s painting stimulate a mise-en-scène of trade between poetic literature and pictorial aesthetics, inviting us to conduct an analysis that takes into account the contributions of this fruitful dialogue inscribed on the path of metapoetry.