”You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère”: Baudelaire’s Preface to Fleurs du Mal

Abstract

Eliot cites Baudelaire’s Preface to Fleurs du Mal [Flowers of Evil] as the source for line 76 of The Waste Land: “‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,— mon frère!’” This is the last line both of Eliot’s Part I and (minus the English “You!”) of Baudelaire’s Preface, a poem called “Au Lecteur [To the Reader].” Eliot thus positions “The Burial of the Dead,” at least momentarily, as Preface to The Waste Land.