Conclusion

The open ease with which magazines of the 1930s such as Echanges, This Quarter and transition placed Anglo-French exchange at the centre of the literary avant-garde typifies the developments that had occurred since the late nineteenth century, when the promotion of French poetry as a potential influence on English poetry was scarce, sometimes covert and frequently controversial. Translators in the early twentieth century continued to draw on French poetry to enhance their own work. In the case of Aldous Huxley, the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarme provided a spur of simultaneous admiration and antagonism against which Huxley developed his own ideas. Translation, re-writing and imitation of Baudelaire's work have enabled writers to re-think Baudelaire's poetry along multiple lines: relation to their own work, in relation to the reading public for whom they render him into English and in relation to the language and ideas of their contemporaries.