Baudelaire and The Making of Italian Modernity: From The Scapigliatura To The Futurist Movement, 1857-1912 1st Edition Alessandro Cabiati

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE
Baudelaire and the Making

of Italian Modernity
From the Scapigliatura to the
Futurist Movement, 1857–1912
Alessandro Cabiati
Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature
Series Editors
Ben Hutchinson
Centre for Modern European Literature
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK
Shane Weller
School of European Culture and Languages
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK
Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements of
the modern period have traversed national, linguistic and disciplinary bor-
ders. The principal aim of the Palgrave Studies in Modern European
Literature book series is to create a forum for work that problematizes
these borders, and that seeks to question, through comparative method-
ologies, the very nature of the modern, the European, and the literary.
Specific areas of research that the series supports include European roman-
ticism, realism, the avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism, literary
theory, the international reception of European writers, the relations
between modern European literature and the other arts, and the impact of
other discourses (philosophical, political, psychoanalytic, and scientific)
upon that literature. In addition to studies of works written in the major
modern European languages (English, French, German, Italian, and
Spanish), the series also includes volumes on the literature of Central and
Eastern Europe, and on the relation between European and other
literatures.
Editorial Board:
Rachel Bowlby (University College London)
Karen Leeder (University of Oxford)
William Marx (Collège de France)
Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University)
Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania)
Dirk Van Hulle (University of Oxford)
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14610
Alessandro Cabiati
Baudelaire and the

Making of Italian
Modernity
From the Scapigliatura to the Futurist Movement,
1857–1912
Alessandro Cabiati
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Venice, Italy
ISSN 2634-6478 ISSN 2634-6486 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature
ISBN 978-3-030-92017-3 ISBN 978-3-030-92018-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92018-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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For Ambra, who has had to learn how to embrace the chaos
Series Editors’ Preface
Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements in

the modern period have traversed national, linguistic, and disciplinary
borders. The principal aim of the Palgrave Studies in Modern European
Literature series is to create a forum for work that takes account of these
border crossings, and that engages with individual writers, genres, topoi,
and literary movements in a manner that does justice to their location
within European artistic, political, and philosophical contexts. Of course,
the title of this series immediately raises a number of questions, at once
historical, geo-political, and literary-philosophical: What are the parame-
ters of the modern? What is to be understood as European, both politically
and culturally? And what distinguishes literature within these historical
and geo-political limits from other forms of discourse?
These three questions are interrelated. Not only does the very idea of
the modern vary depending on the European national tradition within
which its definition is attempted, but the concept of literature in the mod-
ern sense is also intimately connected to the emergence and consolidation
of the European nation-states, to increasing secularisation, urbanisation,
industrialisation, and bureaucratisation, to the Enlightenment project and
its promise of emancipation from nature through reason and science, to
capitalism and imperialism, to the liberal-democratic model of govern-
ment, to the separation of the private and public spheres, to the new form
taken by the university, and to changing conceptions of both space and
time as a result of technological innovations in the fields of travel and
communication.
vii
viii SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
Taking first the question of when the modern may be said to com-
mence within a European context, if one looks to a certain Germanic tra-
dition shaped by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), then
it might be said to commence with the first ‘theoretical man’, namely
Socrates. According to this view, the modern would include everything
that comes after the pre-Socratics and the first two great Attic tragedians,
Aeschylus and Sophocles, with Euripides being the first modern writer. A
rather more limited sense of the modern, also derived from the Germanic
world, sees the Neuzeit as originating in the late fifteenth and early six-
teenth centuries. Jakob Burckhardt, Nietzsche’s colleague at the University
of Basel, identified the states of Renaissance Italy as prototypes for both
modern European politics and modern European cultural production.
However, Italian literary modernity might also be seen as having com-
menced 200 years earlier, with the programmatic adoption of the vernacu-
lar by its foremost representatives, Dante and Petrarch.
In France, the modern might either be seen as beginning at the turn of
the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, with the so-called Querelle des
anciens et des modernes in the 1690s, or later still, with the French
Revolution of 1789, while the Romantic generation of the 1830s might
equally be identified as an origin, given that Chateaubriand is often cred-
ited with having coined the term modernité, in 1833. Across the Channel,
meanwhile, the origins of literary modernity might seem different again.
With the Renaissance being seen as ‘Early Modern’, everything thereafter
might seem to fall within the category of the modern, although in fact the
term ‘modern’ within a literary context is generally reserved for the litera-
ture that comes after mid-nineteenth-century European realism. This lat-
ter sense of the modern is also present in the early work of Roland Barthes,
who in Writing Degree Zero (1953) asserts that modern literature com-
mences in the 1850s, when the literary becomes explicitly self-reflexive,
not only addressing its own status as literature but also concerning itself
with the nature of language and the possibilities of representation.
In adopting a view of the modern as it pertains to literature that is more
or less in line with Barthes’s periodisation, while also acknowledging that
this periodisation is liable to exceptions and limitations, the present series
does not wish to conflate the modern with, nor to limit it to, modernism
and postmodernism. Rather, the aim is to encourage work that highlights
differences in the conception of the modern—differences that emerge out
of distinct linguistic, national, and cultural spheres within Europe—and to
prompt further reflection on why it should be that the very concept of the
SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE ix
modern has become such a critical issue in ‘modern’ European culture, be

it aligned with Enlightenment progress, with the critique of Enlightenment
thinking, with decadence, with radical renewal or with a sense of
belatedness.
Turning to the question of the European, the very idea of modern lit-
erature arises in conjunction with the establishment of the European
nation-states. When European literatures are studied at university, they are
generally taught within national and linguistic parameters: English,
French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Slavic and Eastern European, and
Spanish literature. Even if such disciplinary distinctions have their peda-
gogical justifications, they render more difficult an appreciation of the
ways in which modern European literature is shaped in no small part by
intellectual and artistic traffic across national and linguistic borders: to
grasp the nature of the European avant-gardes or of high modernism, for
instance, one has to consider the relationship between distinct national or
linguistic traditions. While not limiting itself to one methodological
approach, the present series is designed precisely to encourage the study of
individual writers and literary movements within their European context.
Furthermore, it seeks to promote research that engages with the very defi-
nition of the European in its relation to literature, including changing
conceptions of centre and periphery, of Eastern and Western Europe, and
how these might bear upon questions of literary translation, dissemina-
tion, and reception.
As for the third key term in the series title—literature—the formation
of this concept is intimately related both to the European and to the mod-
ern. While Sir Philip Sidney in the late sixteenth century, Martin Opitz in
the seventeenth, and Shelley in the early nineteenth produce their apolo-
gies for, or defences of, ‘poetry’, it is within the general category of ‘litera-
ture’ that the genres of poetry, drama, and prose fiction have come to be
contained in the modern period. Since the Humboldtian reconfiguration
of the university in the nineteenth century, the fate of literature has been
closely bound up with that particular institution, as well as with emerging
ideas of the canon and tradition. However one defines it, modernity has
both propagated and problematised the historical legacy of the Western
literary tradition. While, as Jacques Derrida argues, it may be that in all
European languages the history and theorisation of the literary necessarily
emerges out of a common Latinate legacy—the very word ‘literature’
deriving from the Latin littera (letter)—it is nonetheless the case that
within a modern European context the literary has taken on an
x SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
extraordinarily diverse range of forms. Traditional modes of representa-

tion have been subverted through parody and pastiche, or abandoned
altogether; genres have been mixed; the limits of language have been
tested; indeed, the concept of literature itself has been placed in question.
With all of the above in mind, the present series wishes to promote
work that engages with any aspect of modern European literature (be it a
literary movement, an individual writer, a genre, a particular topos) within
its European context; that addresses questions of translation, dissemina-
tion, and reception (both within Europe and beyond); that considers the
relations between modern European literature and the other arts; that
analyses the impact of other discourses (philosophical, political, scientific)
upon that literature; and, above all, that takes each of those three terms—
modern, European, and literature—not as givens, but as invitations, even
provocations, to further reflection.
Canterbury, UK Ben Hutchinson

Canterbury, UK Shane Weller
Note on Translations
Unless specified otherwise, all the translations in this study are by the
author. It would have been impractical to translate into English every quo-
tation in French and Italian due to the comparative nature of the book, so
a decision has been made to provide a translation only for texts that cannot
be found, or are difficult to find, in English. These comprise, for instance,
all the poems of the Scapigliatura discussed in this book, as well as most of
those from the anthology I poeti futuristi. On the contrary, Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du Mal are widely available in English translation, including on
the internet. While translations of Baudelaire’s Fleurs are not included, the
commentaries analysing and discussing the poems should help those who
are not fluent in French. For the sake of clarity of analysis and close com-
parative reading, the English translations of longer extracts of poetry,
indented in the text, follow the original structure and division in lines.
xi
Contents
1 Introducing Modernity: French, Italian, and Comparative

Perspectives 1
Baudelaire: The First Poet of Modernity? 3
Realism and Decadence: The Modernity of the Scapigliatura 13
Futurism for/against the Scapigliatura 25
References 30
2 Unpoetic Poetry and the Rise of Modernity: Science and

Medicine in the Scapigliatura 35
Stylistic Irregularity and Scientific Polemic in Arrigo Boito’s Il
libro dei versi 35
Oxymora and Juxtapositions in Boito’s Realism 35
The Aesthetics of Baudelaire’s Modern Beauty and Boito’s
Quasimodos 43
Decadence, Progress, and the Irregular Forms of Modernity 47
The Poet Against the Physician: ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ 58
A Poetry of (Organic) Matter and Spirit: Emilio Praga 65
Anatomical Examination and Idealistic Representation 65
‘Suicidio’: Between Scientific Observation and Artistic
Celebration 70
Against Medicine, Against Religion: ‘A un feto’ 77
References 89
xiii
xiv Contents
3 Allegory and Modernity in the Scapigliatura 91

An Allegory of Excess: Boito’s Re Orso 91
The Allegorical Menagerie of ‘Antiche storie’ 96
Gluttony, Putrefaction, and the Worm 100
A Modern Fairy Tale for Monomaniacs: Apparitions or
Hallucinations? 111
Sepulchral Allegories and Existential Anguish in the Poetry of
Giovanni Camerana 117
From Allegorical Figures to Allegorical Landscapes 118
The Beauty of the Grave 130
References 136
4 Sensual Sacredness and Sacred Sensuality: Love, Sex, and

Religion in the Scapigliatura139
Boito: Sadistic Serpents and Angelic Prostitutes 139
Praga: Spiritual Intercourse and Carnal Worship 155
Camerana: The Sensuality and Sexuality of the Virgin Mary 169
References 177
5 Writing Analogy, Writing Modernity: The Scapigliatura

and Baudelaire’s Correspondances179
Synaesthesia and Intoxicating Visions: Praga’s Analogical
Correspondences 179
Poetry, Music as Sensory Union: Boito’s Derangement of the
Senses 197
Camerana and the Analogical Features of the Natural
Landscape 203
References 219
6 From Organic to Inorganic Matter, From Spirit to Speed:

Early Futurist Poetry and the Scapigliatura’s Legacy221
Making the ‘Ugly’ in Literature 221
(Un)Poetic Morgues, Dissected Bodies, Necrophilia 237
Urban Hymns: Orchestras of Hammers and Odes to the Lime 248
The Lyre Is the Machine: The Inorganic Poetry of the
‘Mechanical Man’ 257
References 269
Contents xv
7 Concluding Modernity: Writing Analogy, Writing

Avant-Garde271
References 277
Index279
Abbreviations
Charles Baudelaire
OC I Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard,

‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1975
OC II Œuvres complètes, vol. II, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard,
‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1976
Corr. I Correspondance, vol. I: 1832–1860, ed. Claude Pichois and Jean
Ziegler. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1973
NHE Edgar Allan Poe. Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, trans.
Charles Baudelaire, ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Gallimard, 2006
PML The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan
Mayne. London: Phaidon, 1964
Arrigo Boito
OL Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/Novecento, 2009

TS Tutti gli scritti, ed. Piero Nardi. Verona: Mondadori, 1942
Emilio Praga
PP Poesie, ed. Mario Petrucciani. Bari: Laterza, 1969
xvii
xviii ABBREVIATIONS
Giovanni Camerana
CP Poesie, ed. Gilberto Finzi. Turin: Einaudi, 1968
Futurism
PF I poeti futuristi, ed. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Milan: Edizioni
futuriste di ‘Poesia’, 1912
TIF Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed.
Luciano De Maria. Milan: Mondadori, ‘I Meridiani’, 1983
CHAPTER 1
Introducing Modernity: French, Italian,

and Comparative Perspectives
In literary scholarship, ‘modernity’ is a term often used when discussing

the poetry of French author Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). In the last
one-and-a-half century since the publication of his first verse collection, Les
Fleurs du Mal (1857, 1st ed.), many have designated Baudelaire as the
leading poet of modernity, who not only wrote about themes considered
modern, such as the hustling and bustling of city life, but most impor-
tantly wrote with a lyrical sensibility seen as fundamentally modern.
Statements about Baudelaire’s modernity are innumerable, spanning cen-
turies, languages, and literary traditions, including by some of the most
prominent writers and critics of recent times, such as T. S. Eliot. In 1930,
Eliot (1972, 426) famously said that Baudelaire ‘is indeed the greater
exemplar in modern poetry in any language’, not only because of his imag-
ery of modern, everyday life, but also because ‘his verse and language is
the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced’,
including a radical renovation of the poet’s ‘attitude towards life’. Critical
definitions of Baudelaire as the archetypal poet of modernity started to
circulate in the literary milieu long before Eliot’s essay on Baudelaire,
around the time of the publication of the second edition (1861) of the
Fleurs du Mal. Symbolist-Decadent poet Paul Verlaine, a contemporary to
Baudelaire, would have agreed with Eliot’s description of the modernity
of Baudelaire’s poetry. In his essay on Baudelaire published on 16
November 1865 in the journal L’Art, Verlaine presents Baudelaire as the
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
A. Cabiati, Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity,
Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92018-0_1
2 A. CABIATI
quintessential ‘modern man’, and Baudelaire’s capacity to represent mod-

ern consciousness as the most innovative aspect of his poetry. Verlaine
(1972, 599–600) argues that ‘la profonde originalité de Charles Baudelaire,
c’est, à mon sens, de représenter puissamment et essentiellement l’homme
moderne’ [‘the profound originality of Charles Baudelaire is, in my opin-
ion, to represent powerfully and essentially modern man’]. Verlaine (1972,
600) then clarifies that ‘modern’, in the connotation he gives to the word,
does not mean the modern man well versed in political, moral, and social
issues for the advancement of humanity, thus excluding from his idea of
modernity socially engaged poets of the time such as Victor Hugo. On the
contrary, Verlaine (1972, 600) describes ‘l’homme physique moderne, tel
que l’ont fait les raffinements d’une civilisation excessive, l’homme moderne,
avec ses sens aiguisés et vibrants, son esprit douloureusement subtil’ [‘modern
man, made so by the refinements of excessive civilisation, modern man,
with his sharpened and vibrant senses, his painfully subtle mind’]. Relating
the notion of modernity to refinement and exaggerated sensory and psy-
chological sensitivity, Verlaine equates Baudelaire’s poetry with the corpo-
rality, excess, and agitation characteristic of modern experience, involving
a direct connection between the body of the poet and his poetry. Three
years after Verlaine’s article, in his introduction to the third and posthu-
mous edition of the Fleurs (1868), French writer Théophile Gautier
expands on Verlaine’s conception of Baudelaire as the representative of
modern sensibility. Using a medical vocabulary and imagery of cultural,
stylistic, and linguistic decadence, Gautier turns Baudelaire’s lyrical ner-
vousness as described by Verlaine into an illustration of a full-blown psy-
chological illness, neurosis, translated into poetry:
Le poète des Fleurs du mal aimait ce qu’on appelle improprement le style de

décadence, et qui n’est autre chose que l’art arrivé à ce point de maturité
extrême que déterminent à leurs soleils obliques les civilisations qui vieillissent:
style ingénieux, compliqué, savant, […] écoutant pour les traduire les confi-
dences subtiles de la névrose, les aveux de la passion vieillissante qui se déprave
et les hallucinations bizarres de l’idée fixe tournant à la folie. Ce style de déca-
dence est le dernier mot du Verbe sommé de tout exprimer et poussé à l’extrême
outrance. (Gautier 1991, 45–46)
[The poet of Les Fleurs du Mal loved what is improperly called the style of
decadence, which is nothing more than art arrived at that point of extreme
maturity determined by the oblique suns of ageing civilisations: an inge-
nious, complicated, savant style, […] listening to translate the subtle confi-
1 INTRODUCING MODERNITY: FRENCH, ITALIAN, AND COMPARATIVE… 3
dences of neurosis, confessions of ageing passions becoming depraved and

the bizarre hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness. This style of
decadence is the last word of the Word, summoned to express everything
and taken to the extreme.]
In the same decade in Italy, a group of writers known as the Scapigliatura

was also celebrating Baudelaire as the foremost poet of modernity. In a
similar manner to Gautier and Verlaine, the Scapigliatura associated liter-
ary modernity, and Baudelaire’s poetry, with notions of medical and socio-
cultural ‘decadence’, ‘illness’, and ‘excess’. These concepts are profoundly
interwoven in the literary theories and in the poetry of the Scapigliatura,
which are the focus of this book. In the Scapigliatura’s poetry, the theme
of modernity has various facets related to both the portrayal of contempo-
rary subjects and the lyrical modes of representation of modern conscious-
ness and sensibility. Fast-forward fifty years and, in the Italy of the 1910s,
the idea of Baudelaire as an epitome of the modern poet and of the mod-
ern man is challenged by a group of writers widely considered to be the
first major avant-garde movement, Futurism, officially founded by Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) in 1909. In the great divide that the
Futurists placed between themselves and previous authors, Baudelaire falls
within the category of ‘passéist’ (traditionalist) writers devoted to glorify-
ing the past at the expense of the future, who could not be deemed pre-
cursors to Futurism but only ‘masters’ to be ultimately ‘abjured’, together
with (most) past literature.1 How could Baudelaire therefore have ‘made’
Italian modernity, as the title of this book argues, if the Scapigliatura’s and
Futurism’s interpretations of Baudelaire’s poetry—and consequentially of
poetic modernity—were so dissimilar?
Baudelaire: The First Poet of Modernity?

Many have been the claims of innovation and novelty addressed to
Baudelaire, occasionally very similar in tone and content yet dissimilar in
the label attached to his poetry, such as ‘modernity’ and ‘Decadence’. But
if we analyse Baudelaire’s work synchronically, we can see that in French
and European literary history Baudelaire is at the crossroads between dif-
ferent tendencies. The first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal appeared on the
shelves of Paris bookshops in June 1857, although Baudelaire had already
published a few poems in various journals since 1844–1845.2 In 1886,
historian Ernest Prarond, a friend of Baudelaire’s, stated that the majority
4 A. CABIATI
of the poems included in the first edition of the Fleurs were composed in
the 1840s (see Robb 1993, 18–19, 21), that is, in a period still dominated
by Romantic ideals and by poets of the Romantic school such as Hugo,
Sainte-Beuve, and Gautier, all of whom were Baudelaire’s acquaintances
(as well as early poetic models). In the 1840s, when he dedicates most of
his critical articles to Romantic writers and painters, Baudelaire maintains
an ambivalent relationship with the movement. He collaborates with the
journal Corsaire-Satan directed by Pétrus Borel, who was an exponent of
the ‘Frénétiques’ (or ‘Bousingots’), a Bohemian group of Romantic writ-
ers famous for artistic and aesthetic eccentricities. In some of his poems of
that time, such as ‘L’Irrémédiable’, ‘Le Vampire’, or ‘Les Litanies de
Satan’, Baudelaire strives to revitalise the bizarre and gothic imagery of
‘Frénétisme’ that was relatively popular in the previous decade: vampires,
corpses, Satan, tombs, and so forth. Not only in the 1840s, when the
Romantic inspiration was already fading away, but also in the 1850s
Baudelaire could appear as an outmoded writer to contemporary readers,
for the prevailing literary fashion of the time was not the usage of themes
of ‘Frénétisme’, but the imitation of well-known Romantic poets such as
Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Alfred de Musset.
Baudelaire outlines his thoughts on Romanticism in the chapter
‘Qu’est-ce que le romantisme?’ of the Salon de 1846:
Qu’on se rappelle les troubles de ces derniers temps, et l’on verra que, s’il est resté
peu de romantiques, c’est que peu d’entre eux ont trouvé le romantisme […].
Quelques-uns ne se sont appliqués qu’au choix des sujets; ils n’avaient pas le
tempérament de leurs sujets.—D’autres, croyant encore à une société catholique,
ont cherché à refléter le catholicisme dans leurs œuvres.—S’appeler romantique
et regarder systématiquement le passé, c’est se contredire. (OC II, 420)
[Let us remember the troubles of recent times, and we will see that, if there
are few Romantics left, it is because few of them have found Romanticism
[…]. Some focused only on the choice of subjects; they did not have the
temperament of their subjects.—Others, still believing in a Catholic society,
sought to reflect Catholicism in their works.—To call yourself Romantic and
to look systematically at the past, is a contradiction.]
Baudelaire distances himself from what he considers an old and obsolete

conception of Romanticism, which gave prevalence to the choice of his-
torical subjects of the past or to the celebration of religious feelings.
Baudelaire then illustrates his own definition of Romanticism:
Le romantisme n’est précisément ni dans le choix des sujets ni dans la vérité

exacte, mais dans la manière de sentir. […] Pour moi, le romantisme est
l’expression la plus récente, la plus actuelle du beau. […] Le romantisme ne
consistera pas dans une exécution parfaite, mais dans une conception analogue
à la morale du siècle. […] Qui dit romantisme dit art moderne,—c’est-à-dire
intimité, spiritualité, couleur, aspiration vers l’infini, exprimées par tous les
moyens que contiennent les arts. Il suit de là qu’il y a une contradiction évi-
dente entre le romantisme et les œuvres de ses principaux sectaires. (OC
II, 420–421)
[Romanticism is neither in the choice of subjects nor in the exact truth, but
in the way of feeling. […] For me, Romanticism is the most recent, the most
contemporary expression of beauty. […] Romanticism does not consist in a
perfect execution, but in a conception analogous to the morality of the cen-
tury. […] Who says Romanticism says modern art—namely intimacy, spiri-
tuality, colour, aspiration towards infinity, expressed by all the means
contained in the arts. From this it follows that there is an obvious contradic-
tion between Romanticism and the works of its main partisans.]
Romanticism is not about subjects or the search for truth, it is instead a

manner of feeling, it is ‘modern art’—its principal aim is the expression of
the spiritual and moral attitudes of contemporaneous society. In the last
chapter of the Salon, entitled ‘De l’héroïsme de la vie moderne’, Baudelaire
explains where the Romantic artist should look to find the beauty that best
represents modern culture:
on peut affirmer que puisque tous les siècles et tous les peuples ont eu leur beauté,
nous avons inévitablement la nôtre. […] Le spectacle de la vie élégante et des
milliers d’existences flottantes qui circulent dans les souterrains d’une grande
ville,—criminels et filles entretenues […] nous prouvent que nous n’avons qu’à
ouvrir les yeux pour connaître notre héroïsme. […] Il y a donc une beauté et un
héroïsme moderne! (OC II, 493, 495)
[we can assert that since all centuries and all peoples have had their beauty,
we inevitably have ours. […] The spectacle of fashionable life and of the
thousands of floating existences that circulate in the undergrounds of a big
city—criminals and prostitutes […] prove to us that we have only to open
our eyes to learn about our heroism. […] So there are such things as mod-
ern beauty and modern heroism!]
6 A. CABIATI
By unifying the concepts of Romanticism and modern beauty, Baudelaire

coins his definition of modern art, which must be an expression of ‘heroic’
present-day life. According to him, artists needed to focus on subjects of
their own time, such as the dangerous life of criminals and prostitutes in
the metropolis, thereby conveying modern beauty. Baudelaire essentially
reformulates the Romantic aesthetics to make it adequate to modern
times: the key features of this new Romanticism, namely ‘intimacy, spiritu-
ality, colour, aspiration towards infinity’, were, after all, major characteris-
tics of the first generation of German and English Romantics.3 His
re-configuration of Romanticism, together with his poems written in the
1840s, were thus a ‘déclaration de guerre contre la poésie romantique’
(Robb 1993, 164) [‘declaration of war against Romantic poetry’], against
sentimental Romantic poets like Musset and Lamartine (see OC II, 51,
54, 110, 274), called by Baudelaire the ‘fausse école romantique en poésie’
(OC II, 409) [‘false Romantic school in poetry’]. They were, in brief, an
explicit attempt to establish a new Romanticism rooted in modernity.
Baudelaire explains his ideas on art and modern life in Le Peintre de la
vie moderne (1863), dedicated to artist C. G., later identified as illustrator
and painter Constantin Guys. In ‘Éloge du maquillage’, a section of the
essay, Baudelaire condemns a philosophical notion that, first advanced by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century, had later become part of
the Romantic conception of beauty: the natural goodness of the human
being, and with that the view of nature as the sign of the divine and the
only source of beauty. Baudelaire declares that ‘la plupart des erreurs rela-
tives au beau naissent de la fausse conception du XVIIIe siècle relative à la
morale’ (OC II, 715) [‘the majority of errors in the field of aesthetics
spring from the eighteenth century’s false premiss in the field of ethics’
(PML, 31)]. Here Baudelaire subverts Rousseau’s renowned idea of
human nature as good, and claims that people had mistakenly repudiated
the theory of original sin. On the contrary, according to Baudelaire crime
and evil are innate in the human being: ‘le mal se fait sans effort, naturel-
lement, par fatalité’ (OC II, 715) [‘evil happens without effort, naturally,
fatally’ (PML, 32)]. Baudelaire contrasts the natural and spontaneous
capacity of humans to do evil to the artificiality of good, claiming that ‘le
bien est toujours le produit d’un art’ (OC II, 715) [‘good is always the
product of some art’ (PML, 32)]. As a result, good and beauty are not
natural, but artificial, and fashion must be considered as a manifestation of
art, precisely a ‘symptôme du goût de l’idéal surnageant dans le cerveau
humain […], comme une déformation sublime de la nature, ou plutôt
comme un essai permanent et successif de réformation de la nature’ (OC II,

716) [‘symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface […]
of the human brain: as a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather a per-
manent and repeated attempt at her reformation’ (PML, 33)]. This idea of
the superiority of the artificial beauty of art over the natural one is central
to Baudelaire’s later thought, particularly from the 1850s onwards; his
opinions on nature, however, were ultimately rather conflicting, always
maintaining a link with the Romantic tradition and shifting from a youth-
ful confidence displayed in the 1840s to the denunciation (which was
never quite the utter rejection asserted by certain scholarship) of its wick-
edness in the 1860s, as we will see in Chap. 5.
The other subject that is pivotal in Baudelaire’s imagery of the modern
artist/poet is the necessity for the latter to investigate ‘modernité’,
‘modernity’. Baudelaire develops his most complete definition of ‘moder-
nity’ in ‘La Modernité’, the fourth chapter of Le Peintre de la vie moderne.
There, he asserts that the modern artist must search for modernity in his
quest for beauty—the aim for the artist should be ‘de dégager de la mode
ce qu’elle peut contenir de poétique dans l’historique, de tirer l’éternel du
transitoire’ (OC II, 694) [‘to extract from fashion whatever element it
may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transi-
tory’ (PML, 12)]. By delving deeper into topics already examined in the
Salon de 1846, particularly the issue of the subjects chosen by contempo-
raneous artists, Baudelaire reaffirms that the modern writer and painter
should not clothe subjects in the dress of the past. On the contrary, it
would be better if they applied themselves to the task of extracting the
‘beauté mystérieuse qui y peut être contenue [dans l’habit d’une époque]’
(OC II, 695) [‘mysterious element of beauty that it [the garb of an age]
may contain’ (PML, 13)]. In other words, they should focus on finding
beauty that lies within the spectacle of la vie moderne, modern life.
According to Baudelaire, modernity is ‘le transitoire, le fugitif, le contin-
gent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable’ (OC
II, 695) [‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose
other half is the eternal and the immutable’ (PML, 13)]. Baudelaire
employs the neologism ‘modernité’ to refer to the qualities of an artist to
convey the contemporary and transitory features of their own times: unlike
other Romantic writers, Baudelaire searched for beauty in the subjects of
his present day.
In verse, one of the most significant examples of Baudelaire’s moder-
nity is the section ‘Tableaux parisiens’ of the second edition (1861) of the
8 A. CABIATI
Fleurs, in which Paris and the characters of the modern metropolis become
poetic subjects, with all their moral and physical ugliness and contradic-
tions, stylistically represented by figures of speech such as oxymora and
antitheses. Numerous elements of Baudelaire’s poetry were regarded by
fin-de-siècle critics and authors alike—among whom Verlaine and Gautier,
as discussed previously—as fundamentally modern and ‘decadent’: shock-
ing images of everyday urban life; the juxtaposition of a colloquial register
with a highly refined language, and the use of bizarre and technical-
medical terminology; references to lust, sadism, and perversion; the
anguish and lyrical depersonalisation derived from the impossibility of the
sublimation of death and decomposition; the idea of synaesthetic corre-
spondances between different senses. In late nineteenth-century France
there were contrasting opinions regarding the quality of Baudelaire’s dec-
adent features. Prominent conservative critic Ferdinand Brunetière, for
instance, despised what Paul Bourget had called the ‘theory of decadence’
in his Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883), which considered
Baudelaire as a ‘theorist of decadence’ and the most important representa-
tive of modern sensibility with his glorification of solipsism and morbid
visions (see Brunetière 1906, 231–236; Bourget 1931, 19–26). As Ward
(2001, ix) affirms, Baudelaire’s modernity ‘became for some synonymous
with decadence, with poetry of the city, with the poet as flâneur, and with
the sense of the anonymity of nineteenth-century crowds’. As well as
being associated with the birth of poetic modernity, Baudelaire has been
considered to be the father or forerunner of literary Decadence by many,
a characterisation that continues to these days. In 1906 Frank Pearce
Sturm, one of the first translators of Baudelaire’s work into English,
asserted that ‘Baudelaire is decadence; his art is not a mere literary affecta-
tion, a mask of sorrow to be thrown aside when the curtain falls, but the
voice of an imagination plunged into the contemplation of all the perverse
and fallen loveliness of the world’ (quoted by Desmarais and Baldick 2012,
6). Three decades later, Italian scholar of Decadence Walter Binni affirmed
that Baudelaire had to be deemed one of the ‘fathers of Decadentism’, and
that ‘l’importanza di Baudelaire per il decadentismo è massiccia’ (Binni
1977, 23, 26) [‘Baudelaire’s importance for Decadentism is massive’].
Similarly, Gioanola (1991, 29) described Baudelaire as an anticipator and
cornerstone of the new Decadent sensibility. More recently, Weir (1995,
xv) went as far as declaring Baudelaire ‘the archetypal decadent figure’.
Other critics and writers, however, resolved to detach Baudelaire’s
modernity from the notion of decadence. Since the publication of Walter
Benjamin’s influential essays on Baudelaire, particularly those taken from

his unfinished study Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des
Hochkapitalismus (1969), the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘modern’ have been
frequently linked to a fundamentally socio-historical reading of Baudelaire.
Benjamin (2006, 163) underlines Baudelaire’s constant use of allegory,
originating from the anonymity and dejection of the self in an industrial
capitalist society, and his representation of the city of Paris (and its inhabit-
ants) during the Second French Empire. For Benjamin, Baudelaire was the
first major modern poet. Benjamin (2006, 167) sees the Fleurs du Mal as
‘an arsenal: Baudelaire wrote certain of his poems in order to destroy oth-
ers written before his own’. Hugo Friedrich in his equally influential Die
Struktur der Modernen Lyrik (1967) shares the idea of Baudelaire as the
first poet of modernity. Friedrich justifies his definition of Baudelaire as
‘the poet of modernity’ by arguing that ‘the subject matter found in civi-
lized reality’, namely the contrasting imagery of evil, poverty, and progress
discovered in the modern city, ‘becomes poetically viable. This new out-
look touched off modern poetry, creating its corrosive but magical sub-
stance’ (Friedrich 1974, 19–20). Labarthe (1999, 616) similarly sees the
Fleurs as the ‘first work of poetic modernity’ and allegory as the key factor
of this modernity, since Baudelaire’s poetic conscience ‘confie à l’allégorie
le soin de tracer le chemin, toujours autre, d’une saisie du réel qui prenne en
compte […] la double dimension de perte et de fragmentation qui caractérise
l’âge moderne’ [‘entrusts allegory with the task of tracing the path, always
other, to grasp reality which takes into account […] the double dimension
of loss and fragmentation characterising the modern age’]. Labarthe’s
analysis highlights Baudelaire’s original use of allegory in modern times
and with modern subjects, eventually claiming that ‘Baudelaire est le pre-
mier poète de la modernité, dans la mesure peut-être où il est le dernier grand
poète allégorique’ (Labarthe 1999, 616) [‘Baudelaire is the first poet of
modernity, perhaps insofar as he is the last great allegorical poet’].
According to Culler (2008, xxv), Baudelaire is ‘modern’ because he ‘pro-
duces dissonant combinations, which can be seen as reflecting the dissoci-
ated character of modern experience’. Culler (2008, xxviii) argues that ‘a
major aspect of Baudelaire’s modernity’ is ‘the repudiation of sentimental
themes’, which he juxtaposes to the kind-heartedness and compassion
shown by Hugo in creating sympathetic characters. Baudelaire is, thus,
‘the prophet of modernity’, since ‘his lyrics can be read as asking how one
can experience or come to terms with the modern world and as offering
poetic consciousness as a solution—albeit a desperate one, requiring a
10 A. CABIATI
passage through negativity’ (Culler 2008, xxxi). In her Seeing Double:

Baudelaire’s Modernity (2011), Françoise Meltzer links Baudelaire’s treat-
ment of modernity to the notion of ‘double vision: one of the world as it
was, and one as it is’, arguing that this is ‘a vision in which the past has not
yet caught up with the present, and in which the future seems threatening.
Baudelaire records his encounter with modernity as an unintelligible
morass of contradictions that he cannot resolve’ (Meltzer 2011, 6).
Whether ‘modern’ or ‘Decadent’, and occasionally both, the innovative
aspects of Baudelaire’s poetry are centred around notions of urbanity, evil
and perversion, fragmentation of the self, contradiction and dissonance,
and morbidity.
And yet in the French literary context of the 1850s, when the first edi-
tion of the Fleurs was published and before Verlaine’s and Gautier’s afore-
mentioned essays, the concept of ‘decadence’ used to describe Baudelaire’s
poetry did not possess a positive connotation, nor one linked to the idea
of modernity as advancement of the literary arts. This was arguably
because, in the 1850s, Baudelaire’s work was deemed ‘réaliste’, ‘realist’—
and ‘realist’ synonymous with offensiveness and immorality. The French
Romantic movement conventionally finished with the 1848 Révolution de
février, and the 1850s saw the birth of new tendencies in literature and
visual arts. One of those trends was the so-called réalisme (‘realism’), a
term that had been at first used by art critics to put under sharp criticism
Gustave Courbet’s realistic depiction of contemporaneous subjects, and
was subsequently embraced positively by the latter and by writer
Champfleury, who defined the principles of the école réaliste in his various
writings, such as the collection Le Réalisme (1857) and the articles pub-
lished in the short-lived periodical Le Réalisme (1856–1857). Baudelaire
frequented realist milieus in the 1850s and came to be included by some
critics in the école réaliste. He was a good friend of Champfleury, Courbet,
Nadar, and, as Gautier claimed in his preface to the Fleurs, Baudelaire ‘se
laissa un peu aller à ces avances [de l’école réaliste]’ [‘indulged a little in
these advances [from the realist school]’], visiting ateliers of realist paint-
ers (Gautier 1991, 91). In 1847–1848, Courbet painted the Portrait de
Charles Baudelaire, and in 1864 Henri Fantin-Latour featured Baudelaire
in his Hommage à Delacroix, which Edmond de Goncourt (1891, 29)
described as ‘une apothéose réaliste de Baudelaire’ [‘a realist apotheosis of
Baudelaire’]. As Guyaux asserts (2007, 35), quoting a public adversary of
realism, Charles de Montalembert, ‘Les Fleurs du mal passaient, dans cer-
tains milieux, pour la “dernière production du réalisme”’ [‘Les Fleurs du
mal passed, in certain milieus, for the “latest production of realism”’].

There is indeed a side of Baudelaire’s poetry that can be easily associated
with Champfleury and Courbet’s ‘réalisme’: the Bohemian, compassion-
ate, and societal—and indeed Socialist—atmosphere of such poems as
those of the section of the Fleurs entitled ‘Le Vin’, which focus on the
depiction of the lower classes and of the life of the underdogs, and high-
light the comforting properties of wine and intoxication. The epithet
‘realist’ remained stuck to Baudelaire for years, although he attempted to
detach himself from it from the very beginning: as he reports in the proj-
ect for an article that was eventually discarded, entitled ‘Puisque réalisme
il y a’, ‘on m’a dit qu’on m’avait fait l’honneur…..bien que je me sois tou-
jours appliqué à le démériter’ (OC II, 58) [‘I was told that they honoured
me…..although I have always made every effort to prove unworthy of it’].
It is easy to understand why Baudelaire did not want to associate his
work with the label realism. In 1850s France, the adjective ‘réaliste’ and
the noun ‘réalisme’ were largely pejorative terms used to indicate the vul-
garity and immorality of a work of art. They were principally employed by
critics and journalists as denigrating terms related to contemporaneous
subjects often belonging to the working class and the rustic world, or to
scenes of sexual nature, debauchery, and decomposition, rather than as
referring to a school, or a movement, or even a set of artistic or literary
techniques. The accusations of ‘realism’ directed towards Baudelaire’s
poetry did not come only from the literary and artistic world. In August
of 1857, six erotic poems of the Fleurs were condemned and censured by
a civil tribunal in Paris, the Tribunal de la Seine, for ‘réalisme grossier et
offensant pour la pudeur’ [‘vulgar realism offensive to decency’].4 This
judgement aimed to describe Baudelaire’s supposed offense to public
morality, instead of implying any relations to any movement or school.
The month before the ruling of the tribunal, in his sardonic review of the
Fleurs published in the Journal de Bruxelles on 15 July 1857 and signed
Z. Z. Z., conservative Catholic critic Armand de Pontmartin (2007,
174) harshly criticised Baudelaire’s poetry, in particular ‘Une charogne,
qui dépasse tous les chefs-d’œuvre du genre’ [‘Une charogne, which surpasses
all masterpieces of the genre’], describing it as ‘littérature de charnier,
d’abattoir et de mauvais lieu’ [‘literature of graveyard, slaughterhouse,
and brothel’] and associating it with ideas of ‘decadence’ and ‘orgy’. In a
letter to his friend Nadar of 14 May 1859, Baudelaire himself lamented
the fact that the latter, by creating a caricature of him alongside the carcass
of an animal, was making of him the ‘Prince des Charognes’ (Corr. I, 573)
12 A. CABIATI
[‘Prince of Carcasses’]. ‘Une charogne’ had gained much publicity in liter-

ary circles, to the extent that in 1861 Charles Valette affirmed that ‘tout le
monde connaît sa trop célèbre pièce intitulée: Une charogne’ [‘everyone
knows his all-too-famous composition entitled: Une charogne’], and in
1859 Alphonse Duchesne considered Baudelaire as the inventor of ‘car-
cass literature’ (see Guyaux 2007, 44–45).
The accusations of realism, vulgarity, and obscenity were not only
directed against Baudelaire. In March 1857, Baudelaire’s translations of
Edgar Allan Poe’s Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires were published, a few
months before the Fleurs. Once again, de Pontmartin (1933, 315) wrote
a condemnatory article against Baudelaire, considering him and Poe as
adepts of the ‘school’ of ‘decadence’, the main characteristics of which
were ‘realism’ and the ‘Bohême’. Similarly, in August 1857 in the journal
Le Correspondant (1933, 314) an anonymous critic denounced the repre-
sentations of moral and physical ugliness in the Nouvelles histoires extraor-
dinaires, criticising Poe’s ‘realism’ and ‘materialist genius’.
Baudelaire was certainly aware of these accusations, hence his mistrust
and refutation of the term ‘realism’ as reproachfully employed by criti-
cism. However, in his 1855 unpublished essay ‘Puisque réalisme il y a’,
Baudelaire attempted to cleanse the term ‘realism’ from its negative con-
temporary meanings, giving his own definition focused, significantly, on a
specific oxymoronic connotation. Baudelaire affirms that ‘tout bon poète
fut toujours réaliste’ [‘every good poet has always been a realist’], by means
of sincerity and of the ‘équation entre l’impression et l’expression’ (OC II,
58) [‘equation between impression and expression’]. He then distances
himself from Champfleury’s idea of realism as ‘villageois, grossier, et même
rustre, malhonnête’ [‘villager, vulgar, and even boorish, dishonest’], by
claiming that poetry ‘est ce qu’il y a de plus réel, c’est ce qui n’est complète-
ment vrai que dans un autre monde’ (OC II, 58–59) [‘is what is most real,
it is what is completely true only in another world’]. Baudelaire’s realism
opens up to another realm, whether spiritual, moral, emotional, or simply
aesthetic it is not specified in this occasion; most importantly, it is not
solely linked to the mimetic representation of contemporaneous reality
and of the modern world. Yet there is, clearly, a strong realistic component
in Baudelaire’s poetry. As Guyaux (2007, 44) has argued, ‘le “réalisme” de
Champfleury s’attache à la vie plus qu’à la mort, celui de Baudelaire à la
mort plutôt qu’à la vie’ [‘Champfleury’s “realism” is more attached to life
than to death, that of Baudelaire to death rather than to life’]. In fact,
Baudelaire’s most realistic portrayals—which, as it shall be demonstrated,
are most of the time aesthetically re-elaborated and ultimately transcended

to signify something ‘other’—are of macabre and morbid scenes.
Considering the entirety of Baudelaire’s production, the importance of
realistic elements in his poetry can certainly be stressed; however, follow-
ing Guyaux (2007, 44), I believe that ‘Baudelaire n’est certes pas un “réali-
ste”, mais il n’est aucun sens du réel que sa poésie exclue’ [‘Baudelaire is
certainly not a “realist”, but there is no sense of the real that his poetry
excludes’]. It is this capacity to incorporate the real in all its shapes, forms,
and meanings and in all its contradictions that, first and foremost, capti-
vated the poets of the Scapigliatura in 1860s Italy, deeply interested in
Baudelaire’s capacity to valorise the unpoetic found in reality and elevate it
to the status of poetic material. In its rebellion against contemporaneous
Italian literature, the Scapigliatura embraced Baudelaire’s modernity as
part of its own blending and blurring of notions of realism, Romanticism,
and decadence.
Realism and Decadence: The Modernity

of the Scapigliatura
In his ‘Presentation’ of the group of artists and intellectuals called

‘Scapigliatura Milanese’, published in 1857 in the journal Almanacco del
Pungolo, novelist and journalist Cletto Arrighi, pseudonym of Carlo
Righetti, explains the linguistic origins as well as the specific sense he wants
to give to the noun ‘scapigliatura’. While dismissing the inaccurate mean-
ings derived from a literal interpretation of the term, namely ‘l’atto dello
scapigliarsi’ (‘the act of dishevelling one’s hair’), ‘una chioma arruffata’
(‘ruffled hair’), or ‘una vita da débauché’ (‘debauched living’), Arrighi
presents his own definition of ‘scapigliatura’, considered as ‘una certa
razza di gente’ (‘a certain breed of people’):5
Questa casta o classe […] vero pandemonio del secolo, personificazione della
storditaggine e della follia, serbatoio del disordine, dello spirito d’indipendenza
e di opposizione agli ordini stabiliti, questa classe, ripeto, che a Milano ha più
che altrove una ragione e una scusa di esistere, io, con una bella e pretta parola
italiana, l’ho battezzata appunto: la Scapigliatura Milanese.6
[This caste or class […] true pandemonium of the century, personification
of stupidity and madness, reservoir of disorder, of the spirit of independence
and opposition to established orders, this class, I repeat, which in Milan has
14 A. CABIATI
more than elsewhere a reason and an excuse to exist, with a beautiful and
pure Italian word I have baptised it as follows: the Scapigliatura Milanese.]
When in 1862 Arrighi transforms this article—the first literary manifesto

of the Scapigliatura—into the introduction to his novel La Scapigliatura e
il 6 febbraio, he drops the adjective ‘Milanese’ in order to indicate that the
movement was no longer restricted to the city of Milan.7 In the 1880
introduction to this novel, reworked and retitled ‘Prologo’, Arrighi adds a
reference that signals the movement’s ties with the French cultural and
literary world of the time: the caste or class referred to as the Scapigliatura,
‘i francesi la chiamano già da un pezzo la bohème’ [‘the French have long
called it the Bohème’].8 It is plain that with ‘scapigliatura’ Arrighi aims at
coining the Italian equivalent of the French ‘bohème’, by means of a word
that already existed in the Italian language but with different connota-
tions. The terms ‘bohème’ and ‘bohême’ were used in nineteenth-century
France by such authors as Honoré de Balzac, Henry Murger, and Gérard
de Nerval to celebrate the rebellious and non-conformist lifestyle sus-
tained by certain artists; but it was also employed as a derogatory term by
conservative critics, as seen above in de Pontmartin’s review of Baudelaire’s
translations of Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires. The names of these and
other French authors—but also painters, journalists, literary schools—
were a constant presence in the articles of the time that revolved around
the Scapigliatura.
The Scapigliatura was a movement that spanned around twenty years of
literary, journalistic, musical, and artistic history. According to the chro-
nology established by recent scholarship, it developed between 1856, the
year of publication of Giuseppe Rovani’s ‘Preludio’ of his historical novel
Cento anni, as well as of the founding of the journal L’Uomo di Pietra, and
1880, when the second edition of Arrighi’s La Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio
appeared in the bookshops (see Farinelli 2003, 56). Like Futurism and
other twentieth-century avant-gardes, several authors of the Scapigliatura
devoted themselves to the practice of various arts, such as prose, poetry,
theatre, painting, instrumental music, opera, and journalism. Yet unlike
Futurism, the Scapigliatura was not a well-organised movement. There
were different schools within the Scapigliatura and various manifestos
independently published by its leading authors, and this is certainly one of
the reasons why late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century crit-
ics struggled to recognise the Scapigliatura as a movement. Today its his-
torical importance and aesthetic quality are finally being acknowledged by
Italian scholars. Studies carried out in the last few decades on journalism
in the years 1860–1880 (see Farinelli 1984) have shown the depth and
breadth of the relationships between the various authors, establishing that
the Scapigliatura has the right to be called a ‘movement’ and not only an
accidental ‘moment’ in literary history (Farinelli 2003, 64), reacting to
the crisis of Italian Romanticism and traditional cultural values and antici-
pating successive literary sensibilities. Nevertheless, Anglophone scholar-
ship lags far behind, especially as regards the study of the poetry of the
Scapigliatura. To date, only one monograph on the Scapigliatura has been
published in English (Del Principe 1996), which focuses almost exclu-
sively on the Scapigliatura’s fiction and novelistic works, and no anthology
of the poetry of the Scapigliatura is available in translation. This book, the
first written in English to extensively study the poetry of the Scapigliatura,
strives to remedy this lack.
In Italian literary history, the poets of the Scapigliatura have suffered
from having lived between two very significant literary and cultural move-
ments, namely Romanticism on the one hand and Decadence—mainly
referred to as ‘Decadentism’ by Italian scholarship9—on the other. For
many years, literary criticism in Italy tended to divide the nineteenth-
century poetic scene in Italy into Romanticism and Decadentism, and this
interpretation led scholars to bring the poets of the Scapigliatura close to
one or the other of these movements, but especially to Romanticism.
Various expressions such as ‘Lombardy’s second Romanticism’ (Romanò
1958) have been employed to describe the Scapigliatura and to assess it
negatively, to underline the supposed provincialism of its authors, as well
as, in the case of Binni (1977, 61), to highlight what he believed to be the
low literary value of their works. Indeed, the first monographic studies on
the Scapigliatura, including Piero Nardi’s influential Scapigliatura
(1924),10 mostly associated the poets of the movement with Romanticism.
Starting from the second half of the twentieth century, some scholars
attempted more vigorously to link some features of the Scapigliatura to
literary Decadence and Decadentism. This focus on the Scapigliatura’s
Decadent traits is part of studies that highlight its ‘modern’ and ‘innova-
tive’ characteristics as opposed to ‘traditional’ and ‘Romantic’ ones: it is
not a coincidence that the emphasis on the Scapigliatura’s Decadent char-
acteristics coincides with the first efforts at re-evaluating the Scapigliatura’s
literary works and place in literary history. Over the last few decades, criti-
cal analyses aimed at retrieving and reassessing the texts of the Scapigliatura,
among which Mariani’s fundamental work, Storia della Scapigliatura
16 A. CABIATI
(1967), have progressively underlined its connections to Decadentism and

modernity. These also include Del Principe’s The Demons of Scapigliatura
(1996), which argues that ‘decadent elements in Scapigliatura are less evi-
dence of romantic decay than of the creative vitality of modernism’ (Del
Principe 1996, 110). Scapigliatura’s authors shared ‘a common aesthetic
with writers of the Decadent period’, namely the principle of the auton-
omy of art or ‘pure’ poetry linked to the investigation of the unconscious
(Del Principe 1996, 112–113). In Del Principe’s view, the authors of the
Scapigliatura are the precursors of modernism and the avant-gardes, and
as such worthy of being considered part of Decadence: ‘Scapigliatura’s
“decadence” propels it toward the fin de siècle and to the brink of the
twentieth-century avant-garde’ (Del Principe 1996, 110).
Despite the frequent use of the expressions ‘Decadent’ and
‘Decadentism’, however, scholars have had difficulties in critically defining
what the Scapigliatura’s Decadent characteristics would be. This has prob-
ably been due to the fact that the expression Decadentism—and indeed its
supposed English equivalent, ‘Decadence’—is problematic to define in a
literary context, principally because according to the country—and its
related historical criticism—the term acquires different meanings. In
France, for instance, ‘Décadence’, occasionally referred to as ‘Décadentisme’
or even ‘Décadisme’, was a minor poetic movement in the 1880s, the
exponents of which established journals such as Le Décadent, and it is
generally considered to be an anticipation of Symbolism, at best a first
phase of it, although in fact the two movements did coexist for a period
(see McGuinness 2000, 6–8). In the Anglophone world, Decadence is
commonly associated with Aestheticism and particularly with the work of
Oscar Wilde, who ‘cultivated a continental and decadent persona, deliber-
ately to clash with the prevailing nationalistic ideal in British culture’
(Desmarais and Baldick 2012, 8). In Italy, ‘Decadentism’ constitutes one
of the most important historical categories in literary scholarship, and gen-
erally indicates the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century
poetry of Gabriele D’Annunzio and Giovanni Pascoli.
For the sake of clarity of critical analysis, this study proposes to abandon
labels attempting to define the Scapigliatura’s modernity by placing it
within earlier or later literary tendencies. Comparisons with other authors
are of course necessary to discuss the Scapigliatura’s place in European
literary history—after all, this book is itself a comparative and transcultural
work on the interaction between texts published across a fifty-year time
frame, 1857–1912. But the definition of modernity advanced here has less
to do with literary innovation with respect to previous and successive

movements than with Baudelaire’s own interpretation of modernity as a
contemporaneous sensibility specific to that period, as artists and writers
focusing on subjects of their own times in search for a modern aesthetics.
In the context of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, this
sensibility is characterised primarily by a forceful intrusion of science and
positivist philosophy in literature. Imagery of medicine and technological
progress related to the birth of modern psychiatry, studies on human anat-
omy, theories of hereditary degeneration, and Darwinism influenced liter-
ary forms and techniques, with the result that writers started to adapt
literature to the principles of the scientific method and objectivity, or to
question the very function of poetry in an industrialised, modern world.
As Alberto Carli argues in his study of the relationship between the
Scapigliatura and the medical sciences, referring specifically to the situa-
tion of post-unification (post-1861) Italy:
Letteratura e scienza si muovevano, allora, tra indecisioni e forze dirompenti,

alla scoperta del nuovo, trovando tra loro corrispondenze e distanze in un per-
corso comune. La suggestione, quasi mai rassicurante, che molte scoperte e tec-
niche mediche innovative dovettero esercitare sulla letteratura dell’Italia
appena unificata fu senz’altro molto forte. (Carli 2004, 12)
[At that time, between indecisions and disruptive forces, literature and sci-
ence moved on a similar path towards the discovery of the new, finding
correspondences and differences. The suggestion, almost never reassuring,
that many innovative medical discoveries and techniques had to exert on the
literature of the newly unified Italy was certainly very strong.]
Our definition of modernity, however, also involves poetry’s creative

response to this intrusion of science and medicine, which is a reaction
against the loss of the religious, aesthetic, and sentimental values of
Romanticism brought about by scientific and medical progress, as well as
against the resulting sense of alienation and fragmentation of the poet’s
consciousness derived from that loss. Only by recontextualising terms
such as ‘decadence’, ‘Romanticism’, ‘realism’, and ‘modernity’, analysing
their contemporaneous use and meanings given to them by Baudelaire
and the Scapigliatura, can we have a better understanding of the intertex-
tuality between the Italian movement and Baudelaire in the 1860s—and
their combined influence on Futurist poetry five decades later.
18 A. CABIATI
The main focus of this book is on the most important poets of the
Scapigliatura: Arrigo Boito (1842–1918), Emilio Praga (1839–1875),
and Giovanni Camerana (1845–1905). Several other writers revolved
around the three authors considered here. Gaetano Leonello Patuzzi,
Bernardino Zendrini, Vittorio Betteloni and, later, Luigi Gualdo, to name
only a few, shared similar artistic principles with Boito, Praga, and
Camerana, but ultimately their relationships with the latter were full of
misunderstandings and disagreements over the direction to take, and in
particular over the nature of the Scapigliatura’s poetic art (see Villa 2009,
21–30). In the 1860s, Boito, Praga, and Camerana exchanged letters,
dedicated poems to each other in which they expressed a communality of
poetic ideals,11 and deeply influenced each other. To maintain an emphasis
on the close network of relations and influences among them, I will place
a focus mainly on the works they produced in the 1860s, before they grew
apart from one another and put a stop to their artistic collaboration. It
could be argued that also Igino Ugo Tarchetti, another key figure of the
Scapigliatura, should be included in this book; after all, his poems, which
started to appear in periodicals in 1867 and would be gathered after his
death in the volume Disjecta (1879), can be easily compared, in tone,
structure, and images, to those of Boito, Praga, and Camerana. See, for
instance, in ‘Memento!’, the theme of macabre sensuality serving as a con-
stant reminder of the proximity of death, which resembles Camerana’s
sepulchral imagery that will be analysed in Chap. 3:
Quando bacio il tuo labbro profumato,

Cara fanciulla, non posso obbliare
Che un bianco teschio v’è sotto celato.
Quando a me stringo il tuo corpo vezzoso,
Obbliar non poss’io, cara fanciulla,
Che vi è sotto uno scheletro nascoso.
E nell’orrenda visione assorto,
Dovunque o tocchi, o baci, o la man posi …
Sento sporger le fredda ossa di morto! (Tarchetti 1967, 459)
[When I kiss your perfumed lip
Dear girl, I cannot forget
That a white skull is hidden beneath it.
When I hold your lovely body close to mine,
I cannot forget, dear girl,
That a skeleton is hidden beneath it.
And absorbed in that horrendous vision,

Wherever I touch, or kiss, or lay my hand …
I feel protruding the cold bones of the dead!]
This is a preponderant topic in Tarchetti’s poetry and is unquestionably

central in the work of the other poets of the Scapigliatura as well, but it is
ultimately only one of the many themes treated by Boito, Praga, and
Camerana, which are discussed in the following pages outlining the vari-
ous aspects of the poetic modernity of the Scapigliatura. Tarchetti was
primarily a novelist and a writer of short stories and novellas. He was much
more influential and innovative in fiction than in poetry, and even though
he was acquainted with Praga, Boito, and Camerana,12 theirs was not an
intimate friendship nor a close collaborative relationship. In fact, as Mariani
(1971, 37) explains, the names of these three poets ‘non spunta[no] mai
a proposito dell’autore di Fosca [Tarchetti], né per quel che riguarda la sua
opera, né per quel che tocca la sua biografia: si tratta di due mondi estranei
o per lo meno lontani’ [‘never appear regarding the author of Fosca
[Tarchetti], neither with regard to his work, nor for what concerns his
biography: they are two separate worlds or at least distant’].
In a very significant letter sent by Boito to his friend and colleague
Praga in April 1866, which will be analysed in Chap. 2, Boito gloomily
reports the (false) news of Baudelaire’s death. Boito represents Baudelaire
as the leading author of ‘realism’, and his death as the miserable death of
realism’s veritable ‘soul’ and ‘body’ (letter reproduced by Nardi 1942,
349). It is probable, Boito concludes, that he himself would die now that
Baudelaire (and, with him, realism) is deceased. Praga’s answer is equally
significant. He describes Boito’s news as ‘un colpo di pugnale’ [‘a stab’],
declaring that he loved Baudelaire ‘come una amante’ [‘like a mistress’],
before telling Boito: ‘prepariamoci a seguirlo. Per me, avrò poche miglia da
fare’ [‘let us get ready to follow him. I will only have few miles to go’],
and ultimately suggesting they drown together in the wake of Baudelaire’s
death (letter reproduced by Nardi 1942, 350). The hyperbolic (and figu-
rative?) language suggesting death and suicide was probably due to the
sorrowful and tragic news of the passing of one of their principal poetic
models; we must take into account, however, that since 1864 they, as co-
editors of the periodical Figaro, had made ‘realism’ the emblem of their
artistic revolution. In the 1864 article ‘Polemica letteraria’, long consid-
ered to be one of the two manifestos of the Scapigliatura’s poetry, Boito
and Praga define their idea of art as ‘un’arte malata, vaneggiante, al dire
20 A. CABIATI
di molti, un’arte di decadenza, di barocchismo, di razionalismo, di realismo

ed ecco finalmente la parola sputata’ (OL, 329) [‘an ill, delirious art,
according to many, an art of decadence, of baroqueism, of rationalism, of
realism and here is finally the word spat out’]. As we have seen above with
the reviews of Baudelaire’s poetry in France in the 1850s and ‘60s, where
medical terms related to illness, decadence, and realism were largely
employed, Boito and Praga describe their art as ‘malata’, ‘di decadenza’,
‘di realismo’. Yet these three terms coexist, in a manner that may at first
seem paradoxical, with such expressions as ‘vaneggiante’ and ‘barocchi-
smo’, which stress a tendency towards wonder and dazzle characteristic of
the Italian Baroque, as well as towards the imaginary, the bizarre, and the
fantastic of a metaphorical delirium. This union of contrasting concepts to
define the Scapigliatura’s ‘realist’ art reflects the content of what has been
deemed the second manifesto of the Scapigliatura’s poetry, which shall
also be thoroughly examined in Chap. 2. In the letter that Boito sent to
Cletto Arrighi as introduction to the poem ‘Ballatella’, published in
Cronaca Grigia on 1 January 1865, Boito states the preference that they,
the group of ‘scapigliati romantici in ira’ [‘enraged Romantic Scapigliati’],
had for the ‘fantasticherie’ (OL, 11) [‘fantasies’]. The amalgamation of
tendencies as different as realism and Romanticism in the definition of the
Scapigliatura’s new art, devoted to both ‘fantasies’ and ‘rationalism’, cer-
tainly appears implausible. We have to consider, however, that
le terme flou de ‘réalisme’, lorsqu’il se généralise au milieu du XIXe siècle, porte

sur le choix des sujets et non sur la manière de voir ou de décrire le réel. Il n’y a
pas vraiment d’opposition entre la fantaisie post-romantique et le réalisme
naissant. C’est une même mise en scène d’excentriques ou de marginaux, une
même esthétique moderne anti-bourgeoise. (Berthelot 2003, 209)
[the vague term ‘realism’, when it became widespread in the mid-nineteenth
century, relates to the choice of subjects and not to the way of seeing or
describing reality. There is no real opposition between post-Romantic fan-
tasy and nascent realism. It is the same representation of eccentrics or mis-
fits, the same modern anti-bourgeois aesthetics.]
Although it describes French post-Romantic literature, this statement

holds true also for the post-Romantic poetry of the Scapigliatura. Boito,
Praga, and Camerana interpreted realism in the above signification, as a
choice of determined subjects that were traditionally not treated in poetry
and as a ‘modern’ display of anti-bourgeois lifestyle. As well as
non-conformist and controversial topics such as anticlericalism, physical

decomposition, and sexual intercourse represented through a mixture of
realistic and fantastic elements, the poetry of the Scapigliatura criticised
various branches of modern science for degrading the human body to an
object solely to be studied and/or commercialised for profit. Reduced to
an ugly mummy, a grotesque torso of a statue, a mutilated corpse of a
young girl, or a horrible foetus of twins, the human body put on display
for and observed by the modern audience in both artistic and scientific
places—present-day museums, hospitals, dissection rooms—has lost any
traditional beauty and regularity of forms, as will be shown in Chap. 2.
And yet, this is the type of body not only represented, but most impor-
tantly fully embraced artistically and elevated to an aesthetic symbol of
modernity by the Scapigliatura. Although the practical application of ‘real-
ism’, eventually, would not be exactly the same by Boito, Praga, and
Camerana, their theoretical notion and ideal function of the term can be
summarised by means of Folco Portinari’s definition of literary realism as
a ‘demitizzazione dei topoi assimilati nella tradizione e quindi […] un
recupero degli oggetti genericamente ritenuti inadeguati e rifiutati’
(Portinari 1976, 10) [‘demythologisation of the topoi assimilated by tradi-
tion and therefore […] a recovery of objects generally considered inade-
quate and rejected’]. This view of realism is a key aspect of the modernity
of the Scapigliatura, one that links the poetry of the three above authors,
despite their differences—and, occasionally, different interpretations of
Baudelaire’s poetry and of his modernity. But Baudelaire’s Fleurs are,
indeed, the great catalyst of Boito’s, Praga’s, and Camerana’s respective
poetic experimentations with subject matter, language, and structures not
usually included in the poetic domain.
This volume posits that Baudelaire’s influence on the Scapigliatura’s
poetry is more substantial and complex than scholarship has heretofore
recognised. The pages that follow demonstrate a vast and wide-ranging
influence—on a conceptual, lexical, and stylistic level—on the three major
poets of the Scapigliatura, which can be traced back to the very beginning
of their careers in the early 1860s. Far from being simply an element of
youthful rebellion, aesthetic and moral, the ‘Baudelairism’ of the
Scapigliatura introduced a thematic and formal modernity into Italian lit-
erature, paving the way for Futurism and the twentieth-century avant-
garde. The investigation of Baudelaire’s influence on the poets of the
Scapigliatura is conducted both individually—searching for Baudelairian
features in their work—and comparatively, contrasting differences and
22 A. CABIATI
aiming to locate patterns of similarity. On a methodological level, this

study analyses the material from two different yet complementary points
of view: on the one hand, it examines the textual, lexical, and stylistic bor-
rowings, juxtaposing them to the source text and establishing their signifi-
cance and role within the individual poem; on the other hand, it focuses
on the appropriation of Baudelaire’s poetry on a deeper lever, which
entails the extrapolation, adaptation, and re-elaboration of this material
into the various themes and topics of the Scapigliatura. Indeed, Baudelaire’s
influence on the Scapigliatura has already been studied, insofar as Sozzi
Casanova (1979, 24) stated that ‘lo scrittore che più influenzò la
Scapigliatura fu Baudelaire; una influenza che varcò i limiti letterari e si
estese al costume di vita’ [‘the writer who most influenced the Scapigliatura
was Baudelaire; an influence that crossed the confines of literature and
extended to the way of life’]. Previous examinations of the relationship
between the poetry of the Scapigliatura and Baudelaire, however, have
been generally undertaken within essays devoted to the individual authors
or to single thematic relations, such as the interplay of beauty with ugli-
ness in the Scapigliatura’s aesthetic theories (see Bettella 2000). Being
restricted in scope, they have not focused on drawing a detailed and sys-
tematic picture that portrays the connections not only between Baudelaire
and the poets of the Scapigliatura, but also among Boito, Praga, and
Camerana themselves as part of their process of development of an aes-
thetics of modernity.
Essays that discuss Baudelaire and Boito, for instance, have mentioned
the significant influence of the French poet on Boito’s technical use of
antitheses and contrasts (Maurino 1987; Pomilio 1994, 63–64), or have
pointed out analogies between single poems, in particular Boito’s ‘Case
nuove’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Le Cygne’ (Dell’Aquila 1981, 61; Di Benedetto
1994, 30–33). More complex are the cases of Praga and Camerana. There
is hardly any scholar who has not mentioned Baudelaire’s impact on
Praga’s poetry, especially on his second collection, Penombre (1864).
Scholars are generally agreed on the assessment of the evolution of Praga’s
Baudelairian characteristics, circumscribed to a very limited presence of
macabre and blasphemous themes in Tavolozza (1862), Praga’s first book
of poetry, but preponderant in Penombre, to the extent that the latter work
has been defined as one of the most Baudelairian volumes in Italian litera-
ture (Petrucciani 1962, 72). Nonetheless, scholarship has also maintained
that, despite the apparent profundity of Baudelaire’s influence, in Penombre
Praga did not fully comprehend the complexity and novelty of Baudelaire’s
poetic world due to his own artistic limits and the backwardness of the
Italian literary situation at the time. The influence of Baudelaire on
Penombre would thus be mostly aesthetic, centred upon the most shock-
ing and graphic aspects of Baudelaire’s macabre and erotic imagery and
lacking the sensitivity, metaphysical insights, and symbolism of Baudelaire’s
Fleurs (Petrucciani 1962, 34, 126; Mariani 1971, 229–230; Carnazzi
1981, 30–32; Crotti and Ricorda 1997, 1505). Only occasionally in
Penombre did Praga manage to overcome this superficial influence by delv-
ing deeper into the investigation of Baudelaire’s dramatic representation
of the modern experience in which external reality is interiorised, becom-
ing an intimate symbol of the poet’s dejected emotional state, transfigured
into surreal images by means of analogies and unrealistic descriptions.
Significantly, these sporadic instances in Penombre are deemed closer to
Baudelaire’s own sensibility and therefore not part of the Scapigliatura’s
aesthetics, which is very clearly outlined as a controversial display of ugli-
ness for the sake of it; they are seen, on the contrary, as the first timid
illustration of Decadentism in Italian literature (Petrucciani 1962,
102–103; Mariani 1971, 234, 245–250; Carnazzi 1981, 36–40).
Assessments of Camerana’s poetry at the time of the Scapigliatura put
forward similar arguments. In terms of Baudelaire’s influence on
Camerana’s poetic work of his Scapigliatura years 1864–1870, scholars
have discussed it while examining the impact of the other writers of the
Scapigliatura, particularly Praga and Boito, therefore speaking, for the
most part, of an indirect Baudelairian influence mediated by the works and
guidance of the above authors. It does not help that Camerana’s time in
the Scapigliatura is principally considered to have been formative, transi-
tory, and of little quality or originality (Petrocchi 1965, 22, 24; Finzi
1968, ix), as a sort of preparation for the more mature post-Scapigliatura
phase that would only begin around 1870 (Giannangeli 1978, 4,
124–125). That is why it is commonly argued that Baudelaire’s most pro-
found and unadulterated influence on Camerana occurred after 1870
when Camerana gradually detached himself from the Scapigliatura’s
poetry, identified with the ‘Decadent’ process of symbolisation of nature
in which the landscape reflects the mood of the poet (Giannangeli 1978,
149; Petrocchi 1965, 26–28; Dell’Aquila 1968, 59–60; Moretti 2005, 71).
Even critical works that highlight the Scapigliatura’s modernity not
simply as an anticipation of successive literary tendencies, but more as an
exploration of present-day subjects and of the consciousness and sensibil-
ity of the contemporaneous human being, do not approach a definition of
24 A. CABIATI
modernity characteristic of, and specific to, the Scapigliatura. Running

counter to previous appraisals of the Scapigliatura’s supposed literary limi-
tations, in his insightful introduction to the Mondadori edition of Boito’s
Poesie e racconti Rodolfo Quadrelli indicates the Scapigliatura’s encounter
with Baudelaire’s Fleurs as the starting point of modern poetry in Italy,
‘non tanto perché [i poeti della Scapigliatura] siano stati i primi ad acco-
gliere elementi della moderna poesia europea, ma perché per primi essi
affrontarono in poesia la realtà del moderno’ (Quadrelli 1981, 5) [‘not so
much because they [the poets of the Scapigliatura] were the first to incor-
porate elements of modern European poetry, but because they were the
first to deal with the reality of the modern in poetry’]. Modernity is
described as the literary rediscovery of evil, evil that cannot be eradicated
by religion or modern science, but which must be portrayed in poetry
(Quadrelli 1981, 7, 10; see also Spera 1994, 2). However, after describing
evil as the underlying aspect of the Scapigliatura’s modernity, Quadrelli
separates Boito’s literary output from Praga’s and Camerana’s. First,
Quadrelli underlines Praga’s shortcomings with respect to Baudelaire’s
poetry, arguing that ‘mancò a Praga non soltanto la profondità teologica e
morale di Baudelaire ma anche la capacità di penetrare la realtà del mod-
erno’ (Quadrelli 1981, 11) [‘Praga lacked not only Baudelaire’s theologi-
cal and moral depth but also the ability to penetrate the reality of the
modern’]. Quadrelli (1981, 25) subsequently declares Boito the great-
est—and, implicitly, the most modern—of the authors of the Scapigliatura.
In recent times, Angela Ida Villa has expressed a similar opinion, attribut-
ing Praga’s and Camerana’s experiments with the horrid and blasphemous
subject matter of the Scapigliatura in the 1860s to Boito’s creative ascen-
dency, recognising a fundamental ideological gap in the theoretical notions
of ‘realism’ of the three poets (Villa 2009, 21–25, 30–31). Consequently,
Boito’s modernity would be dissimilar to Praga’s and Camerana’s, marked
by a substantial use of esoteric symbolism in his poetry that would antici-
pate early twentieth-century neoidealism and the Latin renaissance (Villa
2009, 37–38).
Building on the existing critical ideas discussed above and acknowl-
edging the differences in Boito’s, Praga’s, and Camerana’s poetic views
and implementations, this book proposes a radically new interpretation of
the Scapigliatura’s poetry, one rooted in their readings of Baudelaire’s
Fleurs and revealing individual illustrations of modernity that are distinc-
tive to the three poets, but which are also coherent, cohesive, and inter-
connected. Instead of discussing their flaws and failings in relation to
Baudelaire or to one another—whether qualitative, stylistic, or concep-

tual—this monograph puts Boito, Praga, and Camerana on the same lit-
erary level as Baudelaire. Only then is it possible to entirely comprehend
the complexity and heterogeneity—but also the originality and moder-
nity—of the Scapigliatura’s poetry. Accordingly, the investigation of the
Scapigliatura’s modernity in this monograph is divided into chapters that
discuss its different features. Chapter 2 explores the introduction of
‘unpoetic’ and prosaic imagery into mid-nineteenth-century Italian
poetry to depict the paradoxical nature of present-day reality and of mod-
ern consciousness, dualistically split into the celebration of the residual
beauty of art in modernity and the fascination for ugly, irregular bodies
desecrated by science and medicine. Chapter 3 discusses allegorical narra-
tives of death and decomposition used to represent excess, depravity, and
mental illness—mirroring the decadence of the contemporaneous world
through fairy-tale imagery combined with the clinical tools of nineteenth-
century psychology—as well as to express the poet’s emotional distress.
Chapter 4 examines the blasphemous merging of sexual intercourse and
spiritual yearning to demystify affection as previously depicted in reli-
gious terms by Italian Romanticism, substituted by a more ambiguous
conception of love that blends spiritual devotion with sexual longing,
occasionally violent, sadistic, even necrophiliac. Chapter 5 investigates
the adaptation of Baudelaire’s theory and practice of analogical correspon-
dances, which resulted in the Scapigliatura’s experimentation with literary
synaesthesia and the technique of analogy to convey the poet’s ecstatic
feelings, intermixing sensory modalities, the woman’s physical features,
and natural imagery.
Futurism for/against the Scapigliatura

This book also maps the evolution of paradigms of modernity in Italy from
the Scapigliatura to the first anthology of Futurist poetry, I poeti futuristi
(1912). Chapter 6 demonstrates not simply that, notwithstanding
Futurism’s denial of influence and proclamation of a complete break from
past authors seen at the beginning of this chapter, Baudelaire was still a key
figure for the movement, but most notably that the Scapigliatura’s literary
modernity often acted as a mediator between early Futurist poetry and
Baudelaire’s work. This chapter explores the ways in which tropes, lan-
guage, and stylistic devices of the Scapigliatura that have their roots in
26 A. CABIATI
Baudelaire’s Fleurs, served as a foundation upon which Futurist poets built

their own imagery of modernity.
Although scholarship has long advanced the idea of the Scapigliatura as
a first embryonic avant-garde movement that anticipated the experimenta-
tions of Futurism (see Tessari 1975; Grana 1986), systematic and detailed
analyses of the literary relationship between the two movements have been
rarely carried out. Most of them, moreover, tend to involve only individ-
ual poets, especially F. T. Marinetti and Boito (Daly 2012, 2016), or
Marinetti, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Boito (Finotti 1994). The few studies
that discuss the impact of the Scapigliatura on the 1912 anthology of
Futurist poetry, as we shall see in Chap. 6, reduce it to a generic influence
of a sensibility and an atmosphere that are deemed to be typical of the
Scapigliatura, without mentioning, however, any poets or poems of the
latter movement. The situation of the studies on Futurism and Baudelaire
is different; there has certainly been more work devoted to this topic, but
it is mostly examined within the context of the (extensive) influence of
French and Belgian Symbolism on Marinetti (see Cescutti 2009; Vinall
2000; Conti 2012). Furthermore, I poeti futuristi has received little criti-
cal attention compared to other Futurist works—were it not for the first
publication in volume of the famous ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura
futurista’ as introduction to the anthology, it would have probably
attracted even less scholarly interest. But this anthology is historically and
literarily significant because it is the first to have been published as a col-
lection of Futurist poetry, including poems by authors that would later be
remembered and celebrated in Italian literary history, such as Palazzeschi
and Corrado Govoni, as well as writers that have been entirely forgotten
by scholarship—the majority of those in the anthology. Even though, as
shown in Chap. 6, the main poetic form employed throughout the anthol-
ogy—free verse—would soon be replaced by the literary technique called
words-in-freedom, I poeti futuristi is a key publication in the early phase
of Futurist literature since ‘the thirteen poets were brought together nei-
ther casually nor to give birth to a diachronic sequence, but to illustrate
Futurism and its principles. Marinetti himself, the conceiver of the anthol-
ogy, welcomed an organic and coherent reading of this work’ (Podavini
2012, 33).
In terms of content, the majority of these thirteen poets represent
themes and topics that could be considered as characteristically Futurist,
glorifying speed, war, and violence; the modernity of technological and
mechanical marvels such as aeroplanes, electricity, and racing automobiles;
dynamic life in the modern city; or condemning and deriding Romantic

tropes including love and the moon employed as a symbol of sentimental-
ity. Nevertheless, Chap. 6 also demonstrates that the Futurists’ polemical
rejection of canonical literature and Romantic imagery led them to redis-
cover Baudelaire’s and the Scapigliatura’s scenes of modernity, revealing a
similar preference for grotesque and macabre depictions of contempora-
neous subjects used to demystify literary tradition but also, in stark con-
trast to Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura, to promote technological
progress. Futurist poets turned to the works of Baudelaire and the
Scapigliatura for inspiration on topics and themes that were considered as
distinctly unpoetic and unromantic—and therefore modern—such as
medical-anatomical examination, technological transformation, urban
renovation, and abnormal sensuality and necrophiliac desire. Their inter-
est in Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura was not only related to aesthetic
and moral controversy, but rooted in a broader concern for lyrical and
linguistic innovation that led the Futurists to develop literary techniques
based on sensory and analogical experimentation, such as wireless imagi-
nation and words-in-freedom.
Focusing on drawing a direct connection between the Scapigliatura and
Futurism, this monograph voluntarily bypasses the debate on the influ-
ence of Italian Decadentism on the formation of Futurist poetry, which is
a topic extensively studied by scholarship, especially as regards Marinetti
and D’Annunzio (see Mariani 1970; Antonello 1999; Conti 2012). The
premise for a discussion on the Scapigliatura and Futurism is based not
only on the close comparative reading carried out in Chap. 6, but also on
the examination of the literary milieu of early twentieth-century Italy,
which shows links and interactions between authors of the two move-
ments. Daly (2012, 192–194), for example, has demonstrated not only
that Marinetti translated into French a poem by Boito, ‘Le foglie’, in 1899
for the Anthologie des poètes italiens contemporains and dedicated to him
(‘au maître Arrigo Boito’ [‘to Master Arrigo Boito’]) the poem ‘Le
Désespoir du faune’ (1900), but that the two poets exchanged letters and
thank you notes as well. Marinetti was, therefore, an enthusiastic admirer
of Boito’s poetry in his pre-Futurist (pre-1909) years. Daly also mentions
meetings at Savini restaurant in Milan, possibly in the years 1909–1915,
between the Futurists and a ‘scapigliato group’ that includes Boito, polem-
ically considered by the former—after the formation of Futurism in
1909—as ‘antiquati tradizionalisti’ (Daly 2012, 195) [‘old-fashioned tra-
ditionalists’]. But the most obvious link between the two movements is
28 A. CABIATI
Gian Pietro Lucini, a writer who at the beginning of the twentieth century
considered himself as a successor to the Scapigliatura and was seen, in
turn, as one of the very few precursors of Futurism by the Futurists them-
selves. As Mariani (1971, 47–49) has noted, in 1908 and 1911 Lucini
published two essays, Ragion poetica e Programma del verso libero and
L’ora topica di Carlo Dossi, in which he embraces and repurposes the
Scapigliatura’s ‘realism’ while discussing both its prose and poetry,
‘mescola[ndo] la Scapigliatura con le esigenze d’arte nuova avanzate dei
futuristi’ (48) [‘mixing the Scapigliatura with the needs of the new art
advanced by the Futurists’]. Although Lucini did not associate himself
with Futurism, he collaborated with Marinetti on numerous occasions.
Ragion poetica e Programma del verso libero was published by Marinetti’s
press ‘Edizioni di “Poesia”’ in 1908; moreover, Marinetti edited and pub-
lished Lucini’s verse collection Revolverate in the following year. Marinetti
wrote a ‘Prefazione futurista’ to Revolverate, where he affirms that
Futurism reclaims Lucini because of the similarities in their fights against
traditional forms and subjects of both past and recent literature:
Del Futurismo, G.P. Lucini è il suo più strano avversario, ma anche, involon-
tariamente, il più strenuo difensore. […] Egli ha dichiarato di non essere un
settatore del Futurismo. E sia. Ma se non tali i suoi amori, tutti i suoi odî sono
i nostri. La intera sua mirabile azione letteraria si risolve in un’avversione
implacabile delle formule cieche ed impure onde così spesso la Poesia italiana,
anche celebratissima, è andata rivestendosi, specie in questi ultimi anni di
equivoca fortuna […]. Le nostre affinità sono grandissime. S’egli le nega ha
torto: noi abbiamo ragione. (TIF, 29–30)
[Of Futurism, G.P. Lucini is its strangest opponent, but also, unintention-
ally, the most strenuous defender. […] He has declared that he is not a
partisan of Futurism. So be it. But if his loves are not such, all his hatreds are
ours. His entire admirable literary action is resolved in an implacable aver-
sion to the blind and impure formulas with which so often Italian Poetry,
even when highly celebrated, has clothed itself, especially in recent years of
equivocal fortune […]. Our affinities are very great. If he denies them, he is
wrong: we are right.]
Understandably, given his ambiguous position towards the movement,

Lucini would not be included in the 1912 anthology I poeti futuristi. His
poetry and critical writings on the Scapigliatura, however, build a bridge
between the two movements, juxtaposing their rebellious yearning for and
non-conformist struggle to innovate literature in a period which saw the

(re)publication of key poetic works of the Scapigliatura: the second edi-
tion of Boito’s Il libro dei versi. Re Orso (1902); the fourth editions of
Praga’s Tavolozza (1911) and Penombre (1913); and the first (posthu-
mous) collection of Camerana’s poetry, Versi (1907). Ultimately, this
book strives to answer the following questions: how did poetic modernity
evolve in Italy from the 1860s to the 1910s, from the Scapigliatura to the
Futurist movement? Did the poets of the Scapigliatura and Futurism have
a similar understanding of what literary modernity entailed? And what role
had Baudelaire’s poetry in ‘making’ Italian modernity?
Notes
1. See the Futurist manifesto ‘Noi rinneghiamo i nostri maestri simbolisti
ultimi amanti della luna’ (TIF, 302–306), published in 1911. The term
‘passéist’ (‘passatista’) to describe Baudelaire’s poetry is used by Marinetti
in Guerra sola igiene del mondo (1915), in TIF, 334.
2. Even though Baudelaire officially published his first poem, ‘À une Créole’,
in the periodical L’Artiste on 25 May 1845, according to Arsène Houssaye,
director of the journal, Baudelaire published four sonnets in L’Artiste in
December 1844 under the name of his friend Alexandre Privat
d’Anglemont. See Pichois (1975, 1259–1260).
3. For these artistic features in German and English Romanticism, see
Nemoianu (1984, 26–27).
4. Judgement of the 6e Chambre de Police Correctionnelle du Tribunal de la
Seine. La Gazette des tribunaux, no. 9483, 21 August 1857, 829. Repr. in
Guyaux (2007, 247).
5. ‘Presentazione’. Almanacco del Pungolo, I (1857). Repr. in Farinelli
(2003, 211).
6. Ibid.
7. ‘Introduzione’. In La Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio. Milan: Redaelli, 1862.
Repr. in Farinelli (2003, 214).
8. ‘Prologo’. In La Scapigliatura. Rome: Stabilimento Tipografico Italiano,
1880. Repr. in Farinelli (2003, 214).
9. Henceforth I will use the term ‘Decadentism’ to indicate specifically the
Italian movement, and the more neutral ‘Decadence’ to refer to the liter-
ary tendency that developed in fin-de-siècle Europe.
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Arad was undeniably frightened. Although he might explain the fact
of his opening Don’s letter as eminently proper, to himself, he well
knew that he could not make these friends of his nephew see it in
the same light.
“I—I—it came arter Brandon went away,” he gasped in excuse.
“It did, hey?” exclaimed Caleb suspiciously.
Mr. Pepper took the envelope again and examined the postmark
critically.
“Hum—um,” he said slowly, “postmarked in New York on the third;
received on the afternoon of the fourth at the Chopmist post office.
I’m afraid, my dear sir, that that yarn won’t wash.”
Uncle Arad was speechless, and looked from one to the other of the
stern faced men in doubt.
“He—he was my nevvy; didn’t I hev a right ter see what he had
written ter him?”
“You can bet ye didn’t,” Caleb declared with confidence, and with a
slight wink at Adoniram. “Let me tell ye, Mr. Tarr, that openin’ other
folks’ correspondence is actionable, as the lawyers say. I reckon that
you’ve laid yourself li’ble to gettin’ arrested yourself, old man.”
“Ye—ye can’t do it,” sputtered Arad.
“If that monkey of a sheriff finds Brandon (w’ich same I reckon he
won’t), we’ll see if we can’t give you a taste of the same medicine.”
The old man was undeniably frightened and edged towards the door.
“I guess I better go,” he remarked hesitatingly. “I dunno as that
officer’ll be able ter ketch thet reskil.”
“No, I don’t b’lieve he will myself,” Caleb declared. “And if you want
to keep your own skin whole, you’d best see that he doesn’t touch
the lad.”
Old Arad slunk out without another word, and the two friends allowed
him to depart in contemptuous silence.
When he had disappeared Adoniram turned to the sailor at once.
“Where has Don gone, Caleb?” he asked anxiously.
“You’ve got me. He told me he was goin’ to skip, and for us to go
ahead with the preparations for getting off next week, just the same.
He’d lay low till the old scamp had given it up, and then slip aboard
the steamer. Oh, the boy’s all right.”
“He is, if that sheriff doesn’t find him,” said the merchant doubtfully.
“I’ll risk that,” responded Caleb, who had vast confidence in
Brandon’s ability to take care of himself.
But Adoniram shook his head.
“New York is a bad place for a boy to be alone in. Where will he go?”
“Down to the pier, I reckon, and hide aboard the steamer. I’ll agree to
put him away there so that no measly faced sheriff like that fellow
can find him.”
“It’s a bad business,” declared Mr. Pepper, shaking his head slowly.
“If he hadn’t run off there might have been some way of fixing it up
so that he wouldn’t have had to go back to Rhode Island, and thus
delay the sailing of the steamer. We might have scared the uncle out
of prosecuting him. He was badly frightened as it was.”
Caleb gazed at his friend for several moments with a quizzical smile
upon his face.
“Do you know, Adoniram,” he said at length, “I b’lieve you’re too
innocent for this wicked world.”
“How do you mean?” asked the merchant, flushing a little, yet
smiling.
“Well, you don’t seem to see anything fishy in all this.”
“Fishy?”
“Yes, fishy,” returned Caleb, sitting down and speaking confidentially.
“Several things make me believe that you (and me, too) haven’t
been half awake in this business.”
“I certainly do not understand you,” declared Adoniram.
“Well, give me a chance to explain, will you?” said the sailor
impatiently. “You seem to think that this old land shark of an uncle of
the boy’s is just trying to get him back on the farm, and has hatched
up this robbery business for that purpose? I don’t suppose you think
Don stole any money from him, do you?” he added.
“Not for an instant!” the merchant replied emphatically.
“That’s what I thought. Well, as I say, you suppose he wants
Brandon back on the farm—wants his work, in fact?”
“Ye—es.”
“Well, did it ever strike you, ’Doniram,” Caleb pursued, with a smile
of superiority on his face—“did it ever strike you that if he was
successful in proving Brandon guilty, the boy would be locked up and
then nobody would get his valuable services—nobody except the
State?”
“Why, that’s so.”
“Of course it’s so.”
“Then, what is his object in persecuting the poor lad? Is he doing it
just out of spite?”
“Now, see here; does that look reasonable? Do you think for a
moment that an old codger like him—stingy as they make ’em—d’ye
think he’d go ter the expense o’ comin ’way down here to New York
out of revenge simply? Well, I guess not!”
“Then, what is he up to?” demanded Adoniram, in bewilderment.
“Well, of that I’m not sure, of course; but,” said Caleb, with
vehemence, “I’m willing to risk my hull advance that he’s onter this
di’mond business.
“Why, Pepper, how could he help being? Didn’t he get that letter of
mine, an’ didn’t I give the hull thing away in it, like the blamed idiot I
was? Man alive, a sharper like that feller would sell his immortal soul
for a silver dollar. What wouldn’t he for a big stake like this?”
“But—” began Adoniram.
“Hold on a minute and let me finish,” urged Caleb. “That scoundrel
Leroyd was up to Chopmist, mind ye. Who knows but what he an’
old Arad Tarr have hitched hosses and gone inter this together? I
haven’t told either you or Brandon, for I didn’t want to worry you, but
I learned yesterday that Jim is tryin’ ter charter a craft of some kind—
you an’ I know what for.
“He’s got no money; what rascal of a sailor ever has? He must have
backing, then. And who is more likely to be the backer than the old
sharper who’s just gone out of here! I tell ye, ’Doniram, they’re after
them di’monds, and it behooves us ter git up an’ dust if we want ter
beat ’em.”
The ship owner shook his head unconvinced.
“You may be right, of course, Caleb; I don’t say it is an impossibility.
But it strikes me that your conclusions are rather far fetched. They
are not reasonable.”
“Well, we’ll see,” responded the old seaman, pursing up his lips. “I
shall miss Brandon’s help—a handier lad I never see—but he will
have to lay low till after the whaleback sails.”
He went back to the work of getting the steamer ready for departure,
expecting every hour that Brandon would appear. But the captain’s
son did not show up that day, nor the next.
Monday came and Number Three was all ready for sailing. Her crew
of twenty men, beside the officers, were aboard.
The first and third mates were likewise present, the former, Mr.
Coffin, being a tall, shrewd looking, pleasant faced man, who
eternally chewed on the end of a cigar (except when eating or
sleeping) although he was never seen to light one; and Mr. Bolin, the
third, a keen, alert little man who looked hardly older than Brandon
himself.
But Brandon did not come. The new captain of the whaleback, and
the owner himself, were greatly worried by the boy’s continued
absence.
They had already set on foot inquiry for the youth’s whereabouts, but
nothing had come of it.
They did discover that Uncle Arad had gone back to Rhode Island,
and gone back alone. The “scaly” ward politician who held the
onerous position of deputy sheriff, and who had sought to arrest the
boy, had not been successful, Brandon’s friends knew, for the man
haunted the pier at which the whaleback lay, day and night.
“If he don’t come tonight, Adoniram,” Caleb declared, “we shall sail in
the morning, just the same—and that by the first streak of light, too.
You will be here, and I can trust you to look out for the lad. I must be
away after those di’monds. Don’ll turn up all right, I know right well;
and we mustn’t let them swabs get ahead of us, and reach the brig
first.”
He had taken the precaution ere this to have his own and Brandon’s
effects brought down to the boat. He was ready, in fact, to cast off
and steam away from the dock at a moment’s notice.
As the evening approached Caleb ordered the fires built under the
boilers, and everything to be made ready for instant departure.
Adoniram Pepper came down after dinner and remained in the
whaleback’s cabin, hoping to see Brandon once again before the
steamer sailed.
Caleb was too anxious to keep still at all, but tramped back and forth,
occasionally making trips to the wheelman’s turret in which he had
stationed Mr. Coffin and one of the sailors, so as to have no delay in
starting, no matter what should happen.
“By Jove, this beats blockade running at Savannah in the sixties,”
muttered the first mate, after one of his commander’s anxious trips to
the forward turret to see that all was right. “This youngster they’re
taking all this trouble for must be a most remarkable boy.”
“There’s two fellows watching the steamer from the wharf,” Caleb
declared, entering the cabin again.
Just then there was a sound outside, and a heavy knock sounded at
the cabin door. Caleb pulled it open in an instant.
Without stood three burly police officers.
“Well, well!” exclaimed Mr. Pepper, in wonder.
“What do you want?” Caleb demanded, inclined to be a little
combative.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said the spokesman of the two, nodding
respectfully to Mr. Pepper, “but we’ve been sent to search the
steamer for a boy against whom this man holds a warrant,” and the
officer motioned to a third individual who stood without. It was the
deputy sheriff.
“Very well,” said Mr. Pepper quietly.
“Search and be hanged,” growled Caleb, glowering at the man with
the warrant. “If you can find him you’ll have better luck than we.”
He refused to assist them in any way, however, and Mr. Bolin politely
showed the party over the whole steamer. But of course, they found
not a sign of Brandon.
After nearly an hour’s search the officers gave it up and departed,
Caleb hurling after them several sarcastic remarks about their
supposed intellectual accomplishments—or rather, their lack of such
accomplishments.
The deputy sheriff, whose name was Snaggs, by the way, would not
give it up, however, but still remained on the wharf.
Mr. Coffin, who had begun to take a lively interest in the
proceedings, was pacing the inclined deck of the whaleback on the
side furtherest from the pier, a few minutes past midnight (everybody
on board was still awake at even this late hour) when his ear caught
the sound of a gentle splash in the black waters just below him.
He stopped instantly and leaned over the rail.
“Hist!” whispered a voice out of the darkness. “Toss me a rope. I
want to come aboard.”
Mr. Coffin was not a man to show his emotions, and therefore,
without a word, he dropped the end of a bit of cable into the water,
just where he could see the faint outlines of the owner of the voice.
Hidden by the wheelhouse from the view of anybody who might be
on the wharf, he assisted the person aboard, and in a minute the
mysterious visitor stood upon the iron plates at Mr. Coffin’s side.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE DEPARTURE OF THE WHALEBACK,
NUMBER THREE
No emergency was ever too great for Lawrence Coffin. The

appearance of the stranger whom he had lifted over the rail to the
steamer’s deck may have surprised him; but he gave no visible sign.
The instant the fellow was on his feet, Mr. Coffin slid open the door
of the wheelhouse and pushed the newcomer in.
“Jackson,” he said sharply, to the man inside, “go for Captain
Wetherbee.”
Then he turned to the dripping figure that stood just within the door
of the turret.
The stranger was a youth of fifteen or sixteen, with a sharp,
intelligent face, and his saturated clothing was little more than rags.
“Hullo!” said the mate, “you’re not Brandon Tarr, I take it.”
“You kin bet on that, mister,” responded the youth grinning. “An’ you,
I reckon, ain’t Cale Wetherbee. He’s got a wooden leg.”
“I’ve sent for Mr. Wetherbee,” replied Mr. Coffin. “What do you want?”
“I’ll tell th’ boss, wot I was told ter see,” declared the fellow shrewdly.
The youth was evidently of that great class of individuals known as
“street gamins” who, in New York City, are numbered by the
thousand.
He was thin and muscular, quick in his movements, and his eyes
were shifty and uneasy, not from any lack of frankness or honesty,
perhaps, but because his mode of life forced him to be ever on the
watch for what might “happen next.”
Mr. Coffin had hardly made this mental inventory of the fellow, when
Caleb, accompanied by Mr. Pepper, came forward. The strange
youth evidently recognized the captain of the whaleback at once as
the individual he wished to see.
“You’re Captain Wetherbee,” he said quickly fumbling in the inside of
his coarse flannel shirt (the shirt and trousers were all he had on) “I
got somethin’ fur you from Brandon Tarr.”
“Where is he?” cried Mr. Pepper, in great excitement.
“He’s gone to sea, boss,” responded the boy calmly.
“Hey!” roared Caleb, and then the messenger brought forth that
which he was fumbling for—a little waterproof matchbox.
“Gone to sea?” repeated Adoniram, in bewilderment.
“Dat’s it,” said the boy. “He went day ’fore yest’day mornin’ in de
Success.”
But Caleb had opened the matchbox and drawn forth the folded
paper it contained.
“It’s a letter—the young rascal! Why didn’t he come himself?”
“Didn’t I tell ye he’d gone ter sea?” demanded the youth in disgust.
“Listen to this,” exclaimed Caleb, paying not the least attention to the
messenger’s words, and he read the closely written page aloud:
“Dear Caleb—Swivel is going to make a break with this
letter for me, although the Success sails, we understand,
in an hour or two. He can tell you how I came aboard
here, so I won’t stop to do that.
“What I want to say is, that Leroyd is aboard and that the
brig will touch at Savannah for Mr. Pepper’s old clerk, Mr.
Weeks, who is in the plot to find the Silver Swan, too. I
shall leave her at Savannah if it is a possibility.
“If you get into Savannah while she is there, however, and
I don’t appear, try to find some way of getting me out. I’m
afraid of Leroyd—or, that is, I should be if he knew I was
here.
“I’ve got enough to eat and drink to last me a long time
and am comfortable. I can make another raid on the
pantry, too, if I run short.
“Look out for Swivel; he’s a good fellow. He can tell you all
that I would like to, if space and time did not forbid.
“Yours sincerely,
“Brandon Tarr.
“P. S. We’ll beat these scamps and get the Silver Swan
yet.”
“Well, well!” commented Mr. Pepper, in amazement. “What will that
boy do next?”
“The young rascal!” Caleb exclaimed in vexation. “What does he
mean by cutting up such didoes as this? Aboard the very vessel the
scoundrels have chartered, hey?”
“But how did he get there?” cried Adoniram wonderingly.
“This young man ought to be able to tell that,” suggested Mr. Coffin,
referring to the dripping youth.
Caleb looked from the open letter to the boy.
“So you’re Swivel, eh?” he demanded.
The lad grinned and nodded.
“Well, suppose you explain this mystery.”
But here Adoniram interposed.
“Let us take him to the cabin, and give him something dry to put on.
He’ll catch his death of cold here.”
“’Nough said. Come on,” said Caleb leading the way.
Fifteen minutes later the youth who rejoiced in the name of Swivel
was inside of warm and dry garments, several sizes too large for
him, and was telling his story to a most appreciative audience.
I will not give it in detail, and in Swivel’s bad grammar; a less
rambling account will suffice.
When Brandon Tarr had made his rapid retreat from the office of
Adoniram Pepper and Co. he had run across the street, dodged
around the first corner, and then walked hastily up town. He
determined to keep away from the office for the remainder of the day,
hoping to tire out both Uncle Arad and the deputy sheriff.
Finally he took a car and rode over to Brooklyn, and it was there that
he fell in with Swivel, who was a veritable street gamin—a “wharf-rat”
even—though a good hearted and not an altogether bad principled
one.
It being a time in the day when there were no papers to sell, Swivel
(wherever the boy got the name he didn’t know, and it would have
been hard to trace its origin) was blacking boots, and while he
shined Brandon’s the two boys scraped up an acquaintance.
Fearing that Uncle Arad or the officer, or perhaps both, would be on
the watch about the shipping merchant’s office, or the steamer dock,
Brandon decided that Swivel would be a good one to have along
with him to send ahead as “scout,” and for a small sum the gamin
agreed.
Brandon was a country boy, and was unfamiliar with city ways or city
conveniences. It never crossed his mind to use the telephone
communicating with his friends, and Swivel knew very little about
telephones, any way.
So they waited until toward evening and then came back to New
York.
Water Street and its vicinity, and the docks, were as familiar to
Swivel as were the lanes and woods of Chopmist to Brandon. By
devious ways the gamin led the captain’s son to the ship owner’s
office, but it was quite dark by that time and the place was closed.
So they went to the pier at which the whaleback lay, and here Swivel
showed that he was of great use to Brandon, for had it not been for
him, his employer would have run straight into a trap. The deputy
sheriff, Snaggs, was watching the steamer, and no less a person
than Mr. Alfred Weeks himself, was talking with him.
By careful maneuvering the two boys got into a position from which
they could hear some of the conversation of the two rascals; but the
way to the steamer was right under Snaggs’ eye, and Brandon dared
not attempt it.
By intently listening, the captain’s son heard several important items
of news, and, greatly to his astonishment, discovered that Uncle
Arad, Leroyd, and Mr. Weeks himself were playing right into each
other’s hands, and that their object was to keep Brandon from
getting back to his friends, and thus delay the sailing of the
whaleback so that the craft on which the plotters expected to sail
might get away first.
Snaggs was to keep a sharp lookout from the shoreward side of the
whaleback and there was already a man in a boat patroling the
riverside that Brandon might not return from that direction, and a
third person was “shadowing” Adoniram Pepper’s residence. The
ship owner’s office would be watched during the day.
As soon as Brandon made his appearance he was to be seized at
once on the strength of the Rhode Island warrant and sent back to
Chopmist. This, the conspirators hoped, would keep Caleb
Wetherbee from sailing for several weeks, and by that time Leroyd
and the ex-clerk expected to overhaul the Silver Swan—that is, this
is what Weeks and Leroyd themselves were planning to do; but the
former took care to say nothing about the Silver Swan to the deputy
sheriff.
Finding that there was no chance to get aboard the whaleback just
then, and having heard Weeks say that he was going to meet Leroyd
and that they two were to go that night and see the vessel and her
commander, Brandon decided to follow them, and find out the name
of the craft and where she lay, believing that the information would
be of value to himself and to his friends.
Piloted by Swivel, Brandon followed “Sneaky Al” to the New England
Hotel and while the ex-clerk went inside for Leroyd the two boys
waited without, and then took up the trail again when the two
conspirators appeared.
The sailor and Weeks went over to Brooklyn and after two hours’
dodging and running and hiding, they tracked the rascals to the brig
Success, lying at a Brooklyn wharf.
Brandon decided that it would never do to be so near and not hear
the plans the villains made with the captain of the Success, so he
rashly crept aboard and listened to the conversation at the cabin
skylight. And this was when he got into trouble.
He heard the two plotters agree with the captain of the vessel (who
was not in the scheme at all) to pay two hundred dollars for six
week’s use of the brig, providing the Success put to sea at once.
She already had a very fair cargo for Savannah, and the agreement
was that she should put in at that port for the time necessary for the
cargo to be landed.
Thus, of course, the captain, who was the owner as well, was going
to make a very good thing out of it, indeed. He asked no questions
as to what use the brig was to be put to; and he agreed to allow
Leroyd to accompany him to Savannah, where Weeks would meet
them.
Brandon made a shrewd guess that the ex-clerk was to remain in
New York until he was certain of his capture and incarceration; then
he would reach Savannah by steamer.
It was quite evident that the two rascals had managed to “boil” more
money out of old Arad Tarr than they had first expected, and could
afford to be more lavish with their funds.
But, as I said, the boys, by venturing aboard the Success, got into
trouble. Somebody came aft while they were listening to the
conference below, and to escape discovery, they dodged down the
after hatch.
The crew of the Success were already aboard, and the two men who
constituted the “anchor watch” remained near the open hatchway
(the other hatches were battened down), and the two boys were
unable to leave the hold.
Morning came, and found them still there. The cargo was nearly all
in, and the crew went to work to finish the lading by daylight.
Brandon and Swivel retreated into the bows of the vessel, and
managed to remain hidden all day.
They did not dare leave the hold, although they suffered extremely
from lack of food and water, for Leroyd had come aboard to
superintend the work, and would have seen them.
At evening the hatches were battened down, and the unintentional
stowaways were left in darkness. But Swivel, who a shrewd and
sharp eyed lad, had noticed a small door in the cabin bulkhead by
which the cook doubtless entered the hold for provisions from time to
time.
With their pocket knives they forced the fastenings of this door and
Swivel made a raid into the pantry, which was left unguarded, and
returned laden with provisions enough to last them a week if need
be. He secured a big “beaker” of water, too.
Brandon also discovered the ship’s provisions stored near the bows,
and was sure that he could stand a siege.
Leroyd, they ascertained, hardly ever left the cabin or deck of the
Success, and Brandon dared not venture out. At last, after talking the
whole matter over, Swivel agreed to take the risk of giving himself up
as a stowaway, and thus get put ashore before the brig started.
Then he was to make his way to the whaleback and explain
Brandon’s situation to Caleb.
The captain’s son wrote his letter and placed it in the matchbox,
which Swivel in turn had hidden in the breast of his shirt. Then the
gamin pounded on the hatch until the crew heard him and let him
out.
Naturally the captain of the Success was angry enough, for the brig
was already to sail, and they were getting the lines cast off, so he
summoned a night watchman from the dock, who took the unlucky
Swivel in charge and handed him over to a policeman.
This was a phase of the situation which neither of the boys had
considered. But there was no way out of it, and the gamin spent the
day in the police station, for it was Sunday.
He was brought before the magistrate the next morning, but of
course there was nobody to appear against him, so he was
discharged with a reprimand. The police captain, however, kept him
busy about the station until late in the afternoon, before he would let
him go.
“He kep’ me jugglin’ wid er mop er wipin’ up de floor,” as the gamin
expressed it to his hearers.
As soon as he was free he had hurried to the New York side; but
upon reaching the vicinity of the whaleback he discovered that the
“patrol line” was drawn even closer than before.
Snaggs and two of his friends were on duty, for as the time
approached for the sailing, they decided that if Brandon came back
he would do so very soon.
Swivel had seen the raid the policemen made under the deputy’s
instigation, and after the bluecoats were safely out of the way, he
had slipped into the water and made for the steamer.
“An’ here I is,” he said, in conclusion. “Dey didn’t ketch me, nor dat
Brandon Tarr, nuther. We’s too fly for ’em.”
“Of all the scrapes I ever heard of, this is the worst,” Adoniram
exclaimed in comment.
But Caleb, now that his fears for Don’s safety were somewhat
allayed, seemed rather to enjoy the situation.
“Oh, that boy’s smart,” he declared, with a chuckle. “I’ll risk him even
if he is in that vessel’s hold. Leroyd won’t get the best of him.
Probably, too, the captain of the Success is not a bad sort of a fellow,
an’ he won’t see the boy maltreated.
“I feel better, ’Doniram, and with your permission we’ll get under way
at once.”
“But what shall we do with this lad?” asked the little merchant,
nodding and smiling at Swivel. “He’s deserving of much praise for his
honesty and faithfulness.”
“Oh, take me along, will yer?” exclaimed the gamin, with eagerness.
“I’ll work hard ef ye will! I jest wanter see dis thing out, I do! I like dat
Brandon Tarr, an’ I wanter see him git the di’monts wot he said was
on dat wreck yer arter. Say, lemme go, will yer?”
Caleb looked at the ship owner in perplexity.
“Oh, take him, Caleb,” said Adoniram quickly. “It may be the making
of the lad to get him off the city streets. He deserves it.”
“So be it then,” said Caleb, rising. “Now, Mr. Coffin and Mr. Bolin—to
work! You’ll have to go ashore at once, Adoniram. I shall have
Number Three out of her berth in half an hour.”
Steam was got up, the crew flew about their several duties under the
energetic commands of the officers, and within a short time the
whaleback, to the manifest disappointment of Mr. Snaggs, who
watched proceedings from the shadow of the wharf, cast off her lines
and steamed down the bay into the darkness of the night.
Thus did she begin the voyage whose object was the finding of the
wreck of the Silver Swan.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE STOWAWAY ABOARD THE SUCCESS
As we know, Brandon Tarr had no intention of remaining long away

from his friends when he slipped out of Adoniram Pepper’s office to
escape arrest on the fraudulent charge of robbery, concocted by
Uncle Arad.
The events which followed, however, made it necessary for him to
remain away, and, finally, to go to sea as a stowaway in the hold of
the Success, the vessel chartered by the conspirators to make
search for the Silver Swan.
After the friendly street gamin, Swivel, left him in the hold, in the
early hours of Sunday morning, Brandon of course had no means of
knowing what had become of him—whether he had accomplished
his purpose of getting away from the brig before she sailed, or
whether, because she was short handed, the captain of the Success
had retained him.
After Swivel was let up on deck, and the hatch closed, however,
Brandon heard nothing further, except the heavy tramping of the
sailors, the creaking of the ropes, and the hoarse roars of command
from the officers.
The work of getting the Success away from the dock went rapidly on.
Quite fortunately for the stowaway, the hold of the Success was little
more than two thirds filled with Savannah goods. In the bows, beside
a great many bags and boxes and barrels of provisions for the use of
the crew, there were likewise spare sails, cordage, etc.
It would be a very easy matter indeed for him to hide among the stuff
if any one came into the hold.
The scent of bilge water was not at all strong, for the Success was a
comparatively new vessel and had evidently been recently pumped
out.
Brandon judged her to be about the size of the Silver Swan, much
the same sort of craft in fact, and, like his father’s vessel, the
Success was a “tramp.”
It was night—or at least a gloomy twilight—at all times in the hold;
but Brandon thought that it was surely daylight by the time the brig
was under way.
She was taken down the river by a fussy little steam tug and then,
meeting the swells of the Atlantic, and a brisk gale springing up, she
shook out her sails and dropped the tug astern.
Brandon was fearful that he might be sick, for he had never really
been to sea and the brig pitched not a little in the waves of the
ocean.
To reduce the possibility of this misfortune to a minimum, he ate but
sparingly the first day or two out, and by that time all “squeamish”
feelings passed away.
It was dreadfully dull in the dark hold, however. Of food and water he
had a sufficiency, although the latter was warm and brackish; but
there was absolutely nothing for him to do to pass away the time.
There was not even the spice of danger about his situation, for
nobody came into the hold.
He dared not explore much at first, for he was afraid that he might be
heard from the cabin or forecastle.
During a slight blow which came up the fourth day, however, while
the spars and cordage were creaking so that all other sounds were
drowned, he felt perfectly safe in moving about. If he could not hear
what went on outside, nobody outside would be likely to hear him.
On this day, however, he received several tumbles, for the ship
occasionally pitched so suddenly that he was carried completely off
his feet. Nothing worse happened to him, though, than the barking of
his elbows and knees.
Gaining confidence in his ability to get around without being
discovered, he changed his position more frequently after this. The
weather remained fair for some time following this small blow, and
Brandon hung about the cabin bulkhead, striving to hear more of
Leroyd’s plans, if possible.
It was plain that the captain of the brig knew nothing of the real plans
of the conspirators. They had told him what they pleased, and he
was to ask no questions.
It was not long, however, before the stowaway discovered something
which was quite a surprise to him. There was a woman on board the
brig; he heard the rustle of her garments, and occasionally the tones
of a female voice.
At first he thought her to be the captain’s wife, but because of the
youthfulness of her tones and some words which the captain
addressed to her, he changed this opinion, and decided that she was
his daughter.
Brandon was quite interested in her, for a girl on a sailing vessel was
certainly a novelty. He was sure she must be a “jolly one,” as he
expressed it, to sail with her father on a merchantman. Not many
girls would have the pluck to do that.
As the days passed by, and the Success fled on before the favoring
gales, drawing nearer and nearer to Savannah, Brandon became
correspondingly worried over the obstructions to a safe escape from
the brig, which were presented to his mind.
Once the brig reached port and the hatches were opened, it would
be “all day” with him. Nothing but a miracle would save him from
falling into the hands of Jim Leroyd, and he didn’t like to think of that.
He had good reason to believe that the rascally sailor would not
hesitate to injure him in any way possible.
Naturally his mind reverted to the trap in the cabin bulkhead by
which Swivel had gained access to the cook’s galley, as a possible
means of escape before the hatches were removed. If the brig
reached Savannah late in the day, doubtless the hatches would
remain battened down till the next morning. In that case the trap
might be his salvation.
Several times during the voyage the steward, sometimes with a
seaman with him, entered the hold by this door, for something
among the stores. At such times Brandon “laid low” and his presence
was not discovered.
What little food he had purloined from the stores was not noticed
either.
Therefore, as the brig drew nearer to her destination Brandon set
about studying the topography of the cabin—its entrances and exits
—and how he could best pass through it and reach the deck without
attracting the attention of anybody on board.
All this scouting had to be done at night, of course, and many were
his narrow escapes while engaged in this most perilous undertaking.
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” was the motto of the Tarrs,
father and son. In Captain Tarr’s case, and in that of his brother
Anson, it had been, as a usual thing, a good deal of venture and little
gain.
The same motive, however, was predominant in Brandon’s nature,
and he took many risks in thus scouting about the brig’s cabin that
almost any other boy would not have taken.
One night he had cautiously set the narrow door leading into the
steward’s pantry ajar, and sat just under it in the darkness of the
hold, trying to discover if all but the officers, excepting the one in
command of the watch, had turned in.
There was a light in the outer cabin, but he could not see into the
room from where he sat, and he dared not enter the pantry until he
was sure that the cabin was unoccupied. Occasionally a sound of
low conversation would reach his ears from the deck, but otherwise
all was still.

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Baudelaire and the Making of Italian

Modernity: From the Scapigliatura to

Italian Jewish Networks from the Seventeenth to the

The Value of the World and of Oneself. Philosophical

The Value of the World and of Oneself : Philosophical

America in Italian Culture: The Rise of a New Model of

Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from

Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement:

The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel

The Charismatic Movement in Taiwan from 1945 to 1995 :

Baudelaire and the Making

More information about this series at

Baudelaire and the

ISSN 2634-6478 ISSN 2634-6486 (electronic)

Cover illustration: The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements in

modern has become such a critical issue in ‘modern’ European culture, be

extraordinarily diverse range of forms. Traditional modes of representa-

Canterbury, UK Ben Hutchinson

1 Introducing Modernity: French, Italian, and Comparative

2 Unpoetic Poetry and the Rise of Modernity: Science and

3 Allegory and Modernity in the Scapigliatura 91

4 Sensual Sacredness and Sacred Sensuality: Love, Sex, and

5 Writing Analogy, Writing Modernity: The Scapigliatura

6 From Organic to Inorganic Matter, From Spirit to Speed:

7 Concluding Modernity: Writing Analogy, Writing

OC I Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard,

OL Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/Novecento, 2009

PP Poesie, ed. Mario Petrucciani. Bari: Laterza, 1969

Introducing Modernity: French, Italian,

In literary scholarship, ‘modernity’ is a term often used when discussing

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

quintessential ‘modern man’, and Baudelaire’s capacity to represent mod-

Le poète des Fleurs du mal aimait ce qu’on appelle improprement le style de

dences of neurosis, confessions of ageing passions becoming depraved and

In the same decade in Italy, a group of writers known as the Scapigliatura

Baudelaire: The First Poet of Modernity?

Baudelaire distances himself from what he considers an old and obsolete

Le romantisme n’est précisément ni dans le choix des sujets ni dans la vérité

Romanticism is not about subjects or the search for truth, it is instead a

By unifying the concepts of Romanticism and modern beauty, Baudelaire

comme un essai permanent et successif de réformation de la nature’ (OC II,

Benjamin’s influential essays on Baudelaire, particularly those taken from

passage through negativity’ (Culler 2008, xxxi). In her Seeing Double:

mal passed, in certain milieus, for the “latest production of realism”’].

[‘Prince of Carcasses’]. ‘Une charogne’ had gained much publicity in liter-

are most of the time aesthetically re-elaborated and ultimately transcended

Realism and Decadence: The Modernity

In his ‘Presentation’ of the group of artists and intellectuals called

When in 1862 Arrighi transforms this article—the first literary manifesto

(1967), have progressively underlined its connections to Decadentism and

to do with literary innovation with respect to previous and successive

Letteratura e scienza si muovevano, allora, tra indecisioni e forze dirompenti,

Our definition of modernity, however, also involves poetry’s creative

Quando bacio il tuo labbro profumato,

And absorbed in that horrendous vision,

This is a preponderant topic in Tarchetti’s poetry and is unquestionably

di molti, un’arte di decadenza, di barocchismo, di razionalismo, di realismo

le terme flou de ‘réalisme’, lorsqu’il se généralise au milieu du XIXe siècle, porte

Although it describes French post-Romantic literature, this statement

non-­conformist and controversial topics such as anticlericalism, physical

aiming to locate patterns of similarity. On a methodological level, this

modernity characteristic of, and specific to, the Scapigliatura. Running

Canterbury, UK Ben Hutchinson

1 Introducing Modernity: French, Italian, and Comparative

2 Unpoetic Poetry and the Rise of Modernity: Science and

3 Allegory and Modernity in the Scapigliatura 91

4 Sensual Sacredness and Sacred Sensuality: Love, Sex, and

5 Writing Analogy, Writing Modernity: The Scapigliatura

6 From Organic to Inorganic Matter, From Spirit to Speed:

7 Concluding Modernity: Writing Analogy, Writing

non-conformist and controversial topics such as anticlericalism, physical