Benjamin on Baudelaire

"Of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out being jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unmistakable experience. The semblance of a crowd with a soul and movement all its own, the luster that had dazzled the flâneur, had faded for him. To heighten the impression of the crowd's baseness, he envisioned the day on which even the fallen women, the outcasts, would readily espouse a well-ordered life, condemn libertinism, and reject everything except money. Betrayed by these last allies of his, Baudelaire battled the crowd - with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind. This is the nature of the immediate experience to which Baudelaire has given the weight of long experience. He named the price for which the sensation of modernity could be had: the disintegration of the aura in immediate shock experience. He paid dearly for consenting to the disintegration - but it is the law of his poetry. This poetry appears in the sky of the Second Empire as 'a star without atmosphere.'"

Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 343.