Pure poetry · Lexicon

From the book

Intimate Journals

Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The word‘Pure Poetry’ appears as the imagined region reached by a transformation of media and tone.
In Intimate JournalsFusées XXII uses working imperatives: devise a scenario, translate it into another form, immerse the whole, let it become something.
In this edition‘Turn it into a serious novel’ gives traduire its cross-media sense rather than suggesting translation between national languages.
A place to readpour pantomime, et traduire cela en un roman sérieux — The project is a transformation of form and tone.

Meaning

‘Pure Poetry’ appears as the imagined region reached by a transformation of media and tone. A lyrical or fairy farce, perhaps a pantomime, is to become a serious novel, immersed in an abnormal and dreamy atmosphere. Purity here cannot simply mean verse uncontaminated by prose, since the projected vehicle is explicitly a novel.

Nor is purity defined as the absence of feeling or bodily life. The desired work is lulling and serene even in passion. Its unity seems to depend on the quality of its imaginative treatment rather than on excluding heterogeneous material at the outset.

Use in the book

Fusées XXII uses working imperatives: devise a scenario, translate it into another form, immerse the whole, let it become something. ‘Regions of pure Poetry’ is the destination named after those operations. The note does not furnish a completed theory, still less a manifesto for a later literary school. Its interest lies in the practical passage from one kind of art to another.

Fusées XI's demand for atmosphere throughout a narrative provides a close companion. An entire work can share a pressure or dream-state even when its incidents belong to another genre. Fusées IV's mixture of mysticism and playfulness, and its instruction to recount comic things pompously, likewise separate subject from manner. The artist can change the affective and imaginative status of material by changing how it is organized and sounded.

The love scene immediately following the project in Fusées XXII offers a possible instance of transformed seriousness: bodily pleasure is joined to darkness, memory, remorse and reciprocal pardon. The printed adjacency invites that reading, but does not explicitly say that the scene belongs to the planned novel. Keeping the relation tentative respects the notebook's assembled form. Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII's injunction to remain a poet even in prose makes the larger principle explicit: poetic activity is not reducible to a metrical container.

Places to read

Fusées XXIIpour pantomime, et traduire cela en un roman sérieux — The project is a transformation of form and tone.
Fusées XXIIRégions de la Poésie pure. — Purity names an envisaged imaginative destination, not a stated set of exclusions.
Fusées IVmélange de mysticité et d’enjouement — An earlier project also depends on combining unlike registers.
Mon cœur mis à nu CXIIISois toujours poète, même en prose. — The later imperative separates poetic activity from verse form.

Translation in this edition

‘Turn it into a serious novel’ gives traduire its cross-media sense rather than suggesting translation between national languages. ‘Scenario’ for canevas likewise identifies a working outline. The edition retains ‘pure Poetry’ with the source's capitalization, but the word pure should not be silently supplied with a later doctrinal definition. The English maintains the fragment as an instruction and desired effect, not a report that this work was completed.