ABSTRACT
A context for immaterial, irreal experience, Baudelaire’s interior is also the context for his work, for his relation to the productive cycle. It figures at once his removal from the world, and his belonging to it. It is an interior in which time is suspended in reverie,3 as well as one which registers the reality of the inexorable march of time. These poetic reflections might be compared to thoughts he recorded a year later in
‘The Painter of Modern Life’: the artist bears witness to modernity as a condition caught between the eternal and the fleeting.4
