How Do You Bury a Poet? Baudelaire Down Under

This article asks what happens to Baudelaire’s poems when they are transplanted onto the contemporary Australian poetic landscape. Starting with Dorothy Porter’s composition “Charles Baudelaire’s Grave” (2009), it focuses on Toby Fitch’s 2021 collection Sydney Spleen, which situates Baudelaire’s famous “Spleen” poems in Sydney during the recent COVID lockdowns. What emerges from a comparison of the source and target texts is an uncanny overlapping of two places and times simultaneously in lockdown and breakdown. We argue that the distinctive Australianness of Fitch’s texts and their situatedness is enabled by the equally distinctive setting of Baudelaire’s own poems, whose city is already crumbling before the poet’s eyes. Far from being lost down under, Baudelaire’s “Paris” is reborn metonymically in the literal and metaphorical representations of “Sydney” in contemporary Australian poetry. In this way, these new reflexively Australian versions ensure Baudelaire’s living-on in the form of what Ross Chambers calls an intertextual, or paratextual, “thickening,” which turns to the past to look to the future.