correspondences

from an intro to baudelaire (by enid starkie)

"the hidden relation between things here below and in the world above he called correspondences. everything in this world is merely the symbol of a hieroglyphic language and he claimed that it was the function of the artist to decipher the hidden writing of nature and interpret the mysteries of the universe. he considered that only poets who had reached a high degree of spirituality were capable of understanding and interpreting these mysteries. beauty was not for him, material beauty alone. beauty was essentially a spiritual reality and he was convinced that art was the greatest and perhaps the only means of effecting beauty in this world... beauty for him did not lie in the subject itself but in what the artist brought to it. beauty was the flame of the fire, the radiance of the energy, generated by the spiritual shock he received when he was moved and this spiritual shock could come from aspects hitherto considered ugly. he did not see beauty in ugliness, he only said that from ugliness he could distill beauty. from the fire kindled within him the poet forged beauty and the intensity of the fire depended on his spiritual nature. the more spiritual the poet the greater the intensity of heat generated. poetry for him was not mere composition and to be a poet meant to be capable of spiritual growth."