In this course, we will read Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Aimé Césaire together. Charles Baudelaire saw the city and the modern self as endless works of performance art. Arthur Rimbaud, a young poet who read Baudelaire, made pilgrimages to many European cities, in search of a safe haven. When he declared that “the poet makes himself into a seer by a long, involved, and logical derangement of all the senses... every kind of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself; he exhausts every possible poison so that only the essence remains,” he was trying to practice Baudelaire’s theory of modernity. We will conclude the course with the work of a poet from the Caribbean island of Martinique who read both Baudelaire and Rimbaud: Aimé Césaire. Césaire’s critique of colonialism is an exit out of the modernist labyrinth.