In an extraordinary sequence in his “Salon” of 1846, Baudelaire suggests first that “the best account of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy,” an assertion that reflects the characteristic tendency to move quickly between literature and the fine arts in the period, but which is driven in this instance by a claim about criticism, by the poet-critic’s sense that “the best criticism is the criticism that is entertaining and poetic; not a cold analytical type of criticism, which, claiming to explain everything, is devoid of hatred and love, and deliberately rids itself of any trace of feeling.” Baudelaire does not think these characteristics, which he associates with verse, are limited to poetry. When he goes on to address “criticism proper,” he insists that “to justify itself ” it needs to be “partial, passionate and political,” a set of tendencies he glosses with the following open paradox about point of view: “that is to say, it must adopt an exclusive point of view, provided always the one adopted opens up the widest horizon.”
– Jonah Siegel
