Allegorical Dismemberment. The music to which one listens under the influence of hashish appears, in Baudelaire, as ‘the entire poem entering your brain, like a dictionary that has come alive.’ Ch. B., Oeuvres, vol. 1, p. 307. (432) [J78,3]
The antithesis between allegory and myth has to be clearly developed. It was owing to the genius of allegory that Baudelaire did not succumb to the abyss of myth that gaped beneath his feet at every step. [J22,5]
(all citations from Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, M.A. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).