Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire

First published:Les Fleurs du mal, 1857; revised, 1861; definitive edition, 1868 (English translation, 1931)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work

Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire’s most famous work, is classical in its clarity, discipline, and form, yet Romantic in its subjectivity, spirit of revolt, and macabre elements. Baudelaire’s collection contains none of the historical or narrative poems typical of contemporaneous poetic works. The poems of Flowers of Evil were written at various dates, but their grouping and emotional tenor lend coherence and heighten intertextual relation. In the enlarged second edition, the book opens with “Benediction,” describing the poet’s birth, and closes with a vision of death and promise of rebirth in “The Voyage.” The punning title suggests the poems are products of “evil” and “illness” (both meanings of the French word mal). At the same time, they adorn evil. True poetry, like a flower, beautifies whatever it touches.

In the first and largest section, "Spleen and Ideal," the poet discards previous criteria of ideal beauty and instead finds poetry in the hideous realities of everyday life. Although entitled "Spleen and Ideal," the cycle tends more toward the ideal. The first twenty-one poems are all related to the problems facing the artist and to the nature of beauty. Within these poems, there are two subcycles: One considers the grandeur, the misery, and the ideal of beauty; the other considers the three women important to Baudelaire and different permutations of love.

“Benediction” depicts the poet persecuted by society and redeemed by posthumous fame. “The Albatross,” one of the most famous poems of the collection, treats the Romantic theme of the poet’s isolation. The poem builds the traditional antithesis between the genius of the poet and his inability to adapt to an indifferent society. “Correspondences” evokes Platonic correspondences between visible forms and higher reality, as well as those between the senses. “Beacons” delineates the work of eight writers and artists as proof of humankind’s dignity. “A Former Life” revels in the sensuous pleasure of exotic beauty. “Beauty” suggests true beauty is passionless, while passion is animal. “The Ideal” and “The Giant” reveal that beauty is always strange and monumental. In “Hymn to Beauty,” art results from attraction to good and evil simultaneously. In the end, beauty’s chief value is its power to satisfy a longing for the infinite and an escape from the misery of the human condition.

The love poems in "Spleen and Ideal" divide into three groups, each devoted to a particular woman and the type of beauty she represents. Memory is both Baudelaire’s theme and method in the love poems. His emotions reveal a mingling of love and hate, loathing of his own weakness and of his mistress’s cruelty. The poems celebrating Jeanne Duval evoke physical passion and despair aroused by a woman incapable of appreciating his art or love. The sensuality of “The Jewels” is both cerebral and aesthetic. “Exotic Perfume” and “Her Hair” are both inspired by scent, which offers an exotic escape from reality. Baudelaire sees himself as a victim of desire in “The Vampire” and compares his tormentor to a cold, aloof feline in “The Cat.” “The Balcony,” however, traces feelings of nostalgia and anticipates a reconciliation. Madame Sabatier’s cycle of poems parallels the sequence of experiences in the cycle devoted to Jeanne. The poems begin with a celebration of the blonde Venus’s grace and end with contradictory emotions of love and hate. In “Evening Harmony,” the poet’s ecstasy is expressed in terms of religious adoration. The cycle of Marie Daubrun associates her beauty with autumn’s misty skies. “The Invitation to a Voyage,” another of Baudelaire’s famed verses, returns to a lost Eden that he shares with his beloved. The cycle of Marie ends with a baroque poem, “To a Madonna,” that combines love, hate, jealousy, and revenge in a rich, ornate style.

The rest of the poems in "Spleen and Ideal" first adopt a lighter tone before yielding to a somber mood, enhancing the irony that Baudelaire felt was fundamental to literary creation. Spleen is a metaphysical malady, a paralysis of emotions, a feeling of isolation, a lack of desire. Nature reflects his fear in “Obsession.” “The Thirst for Nothingness,” one of the better-known "Spleen and Ideal" poems, reflects the utter despair of the poet by images of absence. The most sadistic of the poems, “The Self-Torturer,” seems an ironic commentary on his lover’s deception but also seems to refer to his own self-deception.

In the next section, "Parisian Scenes," Baudelaire finds inspiration in the streets of Paris, lingering in the mystical acuity of sensation. He added the Parisian poems in 1861 to create a cityscape. In “Landscape,” which opens the new section, Baudelaire combines personal impression with realistic description. “The Swan” expresses the feelings of exile that he shares with other city dwellers. “The Blind,” like the poet himself, wander through the city in bewilderment and despair. The poet, however, has no hope, while the blind, eyes heavenward, have faith. In “To a Passerby,” the poet encounters a woman who, as she disappears from sight, brings a realization of a love that might have been. In “Parisian Dream,” Baudelaire envisions a futuristic city without nature, sound, or light. The dream he recounts, induced by drugs, marks a preference for the artificial. In “Twilight” and “Dawn,” he celebrates the city rather than nature. Baudelaire endows the cityscape with mystery and tragedy.

In the sections "Wine" and "Flowers of Evil," the poet turns to wine and sadism as an artificial paradise. In the 1861 edition, wine and narcotics symbolize vices that ultimately lead to humanity’s destruction. There are only five poems in the section "Wine," and these are among the least successful in the collection. In "Flowers of Evil," he indulges in sadistic dreams of torture and violence to stimulate his senses and enliven dead emotions. The opening poem, “Destruction,” depicts a struggle between extreme sensuality and spiritual longing. Throughout the cycle, Baudelaire emphasizes the deceptive charm of evil and its disastrous consequences. In “A Martyr,” the beauty of an ornate room redolent with decaying flowers frames the sight of a woman’s decapitated body, rendering the horrible beautiful. “The Damned Women,” which was banned in the 1861 edition, evokes compassion for those who ignore custom and law. Baudelaire, in the poems on lesbianism, pities those who suffer torment from pleasure. “Lesbos” looks back nostalgically to Sappho’s time. “A Voyage to Cythera,” one of the finest poems in the collection, is an ironic allegory of idealized love.

In the section "Revolt," the poet rejects his illusions and revolts against an imperfect world. While admitting Christ’s divinity and remembering his suffering, he reproaches his failure to seek reform through positive action. “The Denial of Saint Peter” encourages human struggle against pain and evil. “Abel and Cain” focuses on Cain, who rejects society and an unjust God, whereas Abel is smugly content. “The Litanies of Satan” are based on the Catholic liturgy. The prayers are directed to the romantic Satan, who was a symbol of revolt and heroic energy. Since God is evil and Christ has failed, Satan comforts by offering revolt against the injustice of social order.

In the cycle entitled "Death," the poet longs for the discovery of another world. Death is welcomed as the only hope in “The Death of the Poor.” In “The Death of Artists,” death brings fruition to their dreams. “The Voyage” brings the collection to a logical conclusion by reintroducing the taste for the infinite, the desire to escape, the quest for the unknown, the prevalence of sin, and a disbelief in progress. The dramatic use of monologue and dialogue, the change of tone from casual to sweeping, alternations in mood from ironic to exalted, and inventive imagery mark the culmination of Baudelaire’s poetic creation.

The conflicts between good and evil, spleen and ideal, and dream and reality unify the six sections. Obsessed with a belief in original sin and the duality of human nature, Baudelaire examines the spiritual problems of his age with a brutal self-analysis that distinguishes him from his predecessors. The poems are morally neutral, recording obsessions, fantasies, delinquency, inertia, and despair in a claustrophobic atmosphere. His sympathies for his fellow beings are selective, but he champions those on the margins of society, both meek victims and defiant rebels. Descriptions of nature are virtually absent from his poetry; instead, the city is invoked as a concentrated arena of human distress and of vitality.

Among Baudelaire’s chief innovations are correspondences on a transcendental level between the visible and invisible worlds, and between exterior nature and inner thoughts and feelings. He finds symbols in exterior reality that correspond to his inner thoughts and feelings. Human beauty is a terrestrial experience that finds its double in transcendent experience. This type of symbol not only gives concrete form to abstraction but also helps Baudelaire to achieve an indispensable obscurity that allows the reader’s participation. Baudelaire also introduces correspondences between the senses in a synesthetic mixture of sounds, colors, and perfumes. Perfumes, colors, and sounds, in turn, suggest feelings and moods.

Baudelaire prefers analysis to pure exoticism. His poetry introduces the crude or prosaic image in the midst of highly poetic style and treats sordid reality without losing poetic elevation. Allegorical personifications dominate his poetry. Emotional and intellectual states are featured as characters, such as Pleasure and Bitterness, and recall baroque poetry. Irony, including puns, paradox, and antithesis, is the most common feature of expression. Images of infinity contrast with those of immobility throughout the collection. The very ideal of Beauty is absolute immobility. For all of Baudelaire’s innovation in poetic expression, he does not experiment with prosody. The structure of his lines and stanzas is firmly entrenched in the classical French tradition.

Flowers of Evil spiritualizes both memory and sensuous fulfillment. The majority of the poems are marked by recollection. Baudelaire was among the first poets to explore the full potential of olfactory images and their association with memory. Memory heightens the contradiction between desire for the infinite and for the sensual and concrete. The love poems also turn to a past more strongly desired than the present. Love poems, which serve as tributes to the physical and moral attributes of women, examine psychological as well as physical moments of intimacy. The relationships move from passion to tenderness to disenchantment. As the poet moves from past to present, love evolves into obsession mingled with contempt, degradation, and torment.

Baudelaire was well aware that he risked prosecution for blasphemy and offenses against public morality on the publication of Flowers of Evil. The defense offered at the trial claimed that book should be taken as a whole. Blasphemous or obscene poems must be set against others of spiritual beauty and platonic love. His Satanism and rebelliousness reflect romantic developments, while his subject matter resembles that of the realists, and his love poetry revives Renaissance traditions of gallantry. His exploration of the associative powers of language also anticipates surrealism. Baudelaire not only synthesized traditions but also created innovative verse through the intensity and detail of his self-analysis, the emotional ambivalence that confuses hate and love, and an eye for the teeming pathos and mystery of city life.

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