"Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place"
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Baudelaire stages modernity as a street-level power struggle: not an abstract debate, but two “ambitious men” colliding on a narrow road where only one gets to pass. It’s a brilliantly petty metaphor for a grand historical shift. “Poetry” and “progress” aren’t framed as opposites in principle; they’re rivals in temperament. Each wants dominance, each wants the future, and their “instinctive hatred” suggests something deeper than ideology: an animal recognition that the other threatens its oxygen.
The line lands in mid-19th-century Paris, when “progress” meant Haussmannization, industry, bourgeois order, and the cult of usefulness. Baudelaire lived the psychic cost of that makeover: the city’s speed, its crowds, its rationalized spaces, and the pressure to turn art into commodity or decoration. His point isn’t that change is bad, but that progress has a way of acting like a moral alibi. It claims inevitability and then demands everything else step aside.
Notice the sting in “give place.” It’s spatial, not philosophical. Progress doesn’t refute poetry; it crowds it out. The road is shared only until the moment of encounter, then coexistence becomes impossible. Under the surface is Baudelaire’s suspicion that the modern world tolerates art only if it behaves: inspirational, profitable, easily captioned. Poetry, in his sense, is the unruly perception that interrupts the smooth story of improvement. Progress can’t stand being interrupted.
The line lands in mid-19th-century Paris, when “progress” meant Haussmannization, industry, bourgeois order, and the cult of usefulness. Baudelaire lived the psychic cost of that makeover: the city’s speed, its crowds, its rationalized spaces, and the pressure to turn art into commodity or decoration. His point isn’t that change is bad, but that progress has a way of acting like a moral alibi. It claims inevitability and then demands everything else step aside.
Notice the sting in “give place.” It’s spatial, not philosophical. Progress doesn’t refute poetry; it crowds it out. The road is shared only until the moment of encounter, then coexistence becomes impossible. Under the surface is Baudelaire’s suspicion that the modern world tolerates art only if it behaves: inspirational, profitable, easily captioned. Poetry, in his sense, is the unruly perception that interrupts the smooth story of improvement. Progress can’t stand being interrupted.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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