Lucy Sante in NYRB in 2013: ‘“Il faut être absolument moderne,” wrote Rimbaud, but for Baudelaire, his immediate predecessor in the dissenting chair of French poetry, the matter was considerably more fraught. Roberto Calasso remarks that he “abhorred the new that the world was throwing up in abundance all around him.”’

And: ‘Jules Laforgue, another of his heirs, drew up an impressive list of his firsts: (…) The first who was not triumphant but accused himself…. He was the first to break with the public….’

Also: ‘While Flaubert, in a letter of 1852, wrote: “Masterpieces are bêtes. They have a tranquil air like the very productions of nature, such as big animals and mountains.” As a noun, bête means “beast”; it is more than a simple slur, instead suggesting something primal, nonreductively animalistic.’

The masterpiece is animalistic. Primal.

The genius proves, once again, to be an animal in human disguise.

(a sf 2196)