#Poem Upon the Lisbon Disaster

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Fine Press Friday!

This week we present Poem Upon the Lisbon Disaster, by Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), illustrated with original wood engravings by American printmaker, illustrator, and wood engraver Lynd Ward, and translated by the American poet Anthony Hecht from the Pléiade edition of 1961. It was designed by Michael McCurdy at the Penmæn Press and set by Michael Bixler in Monotype Blado for the French text and Poliphilus for the English. McCurdy hand-printed the book on Ragston paper with assistance from Evelyn Clarke, and the book was bound by Robert Burlen and Son in Lincoln, Massachusetts in 1977 in three separate versions, totaling 500 assorted copies.  

In his introduction to the edition, Arthur Wilson notes that the massive earthquake that hit Lisbon in 1755 had a profound impact on then-famous dramatist, poet, and historian Voltaire, reinvigorating his disbelief in “all is for the best,” with the cynical quote “Optimism and all-is-well got it in the neck.”  The Lisbon earthquake is believed to be the most extreme earthquake in human history, with estimations concluding that 60,000 people perished from the first shocks or the ensuing tremors and seismologists believe that this event would have registered an 8.9 on the Richter Scale. It is no wonder that Voltaire found himself questioning his primary beliefs and values after a disaster of this scale, and he even referred to this poem as a sermon. 

Ward’s wood engravings follow this religious theme by tying a sense of impending doom into the increasingly dark perspective of the poetry. Beginning with a man gazing into a sunny sky and ending with hooded creatures approaching the man, the illustrations further convey the idea of despair and loss that Voltaire unmistakably conveys throughout the meandering, sorrowful poem. This poem is widely regarded as an introduction to Voltaire’s acclaimed 1759 novel Candide where he confronts the problem of evil, and also includes an episode on the Lisbon earthquake. 

View more posts featuring Lynd Ward illustrations. 

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-Emily, Special Collections Writing Intern

[der-unverantwortliche]

In both “Le Gâteau” and the essay on laughter, we see the later Baudelaire didactically demonstrating, as he will do again and again, how one must not succumb to illusions of purity, innocence, goodness—or even happiness.

[…]

The way Baudelaire manipulates dualities performs a conceptual contradiction. The position of the antithesis is inverted, such that evil becomes natural and virtue artificial; makeup is more virtuous when caked on obviously than when pretending to be natural, etc. Baudelaire’s dualities, in other words, manifest themselves in stylistic as well as conceptual contradiction, as if Original Sin were counter-intuitive (“I was a baby and yet…”) and one had to be forcibly reminded by wrenching everything palpable into its opposite, lest one lapse into unacceptable—because self-deluded—contentment.

This understanding of Original Sin is behind Baudelaire’s literary judgment with respect to Rousseau and Sand. His disappointment in Hugo’s Les Misérables is also directly to do with Baudelaire’s belief in the inherent sinfulness of man. Hugo, writes Baudelaire with evident surprise, “is for Man, and yet not against God. He has confidence in God, and yet he is not against Man.” These are sentences that can only be understood in the light of Baudelaire’s unshakeable belief in Original Sin as the basis of “everything.” If you are for Man, then you will no doubt be against God. The most obvious example of this approach is Voltaire, for whom the earthquake in Lisbon proved the incompatibility of a loving God, given that the horrors of natural disasters can only have been produced by God’s hand. If on the other hand you are for God, then you will believe that Man must necessarily deserve the tragedies that are visited upon him regularly. In any case, concludes Baudelaire, egotistical Happiness needs to be dragged by the hair occasionally by a “poet or philosopher” and have her nose rubbed in the blood and odor she produces.

[…]

Baudelaire, following Maistre in turn (and veering off a bit), finds in contradiction the symptoms and power of evil, as we have noted. Augustine, however, does not acknowledge the terrorizing possibilities of his antinomies. In closing his chapter, he ends with a quote from Sirach 15, in a way that seems to return to Baudelaire’s dueling “two persons,” but with the implication that all is right, that contradictions make God’s ordinance even more luminous: “Look at all the works of the Most High: / they go in pairs, one the opposite of the other” (Eccl 33:14,15). Perhaps it is the ethos of modernity that makes such a statement terrifying rather than reassuring: one against one in Baudelaire signals, not the beauty of contradiction, but the power of evil, so pervasive that it presents itself as struggling to overcome its opposite, even as it knows it has always already won. Herein lies the frightening vision of the Flowers of Evil for the poet.

For Baudelaire, echoing the ferocious Maistre, evil is a given and choice an illusion. Baudelaire’s poems, full of descriptions of the underworld and its characters, betray an increasingly pessimistic view that allows for neither freedom nor innocence—nor, significantly, grace. Man does not choose sin for Baudelaire; man is sin, and wallows in it ineluctably. The difference in views of Original Sin make for the contrast between a perspective that allows for humor and irony (such as Kierkegaard), and a sense of claustrophobia, a feeling of being trapped by the bondage of existence (Baudelaire). “Anywhere out of the world” is the English title for one of Baudelaire’s poems. Kierkegaard’s leap into faith seems joyful by contrast.