The Flowers of Evil

Charles Baudelaire

Nov 2022 · Open Road Media

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Loneliness, temptation, the fragility of man in a soulless new age . . . The controversial, banned masterpiece from the nineteenth-century French poet.
 
Sparking scandal in France, declared “an outrage to public morals” and “an offense to religious morals” by the Ministry of the Interior, The Flowers of Evil plunged Charles Baudelaire into a controversy that his public image never quite overcame. Nevertheless, the collection has since been lauded as a landmark in literary history and its writer extolled as the first modern poet.
 
With themes of love, world-weariness, beauty, and death, The Flowers of Evil juxtaposes the sublime with the commonplace. In the section titled “Parisian Scenes” are some of Baudelaire’s greatest poems—“The Swan,” “The Little Old Women,” and “The Seven Old Men”—which give readers an unsentimental view of the City of Light and of a bleak urban existence. As the Wall Street Journal proclaimed, “There is a sense in these angry, eructating late fragments of a man fully releasing himself to what he called ‘the joy of downward descent.’ And where Baudelaire went, modernity tended to follow.”
 
“The essence of a genius.” —The Guardian
 
“The profound originality of Charles Baudelaire is to represent powerfully and essentially modern man.” —Paul Verlaine

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Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist and art critic. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticism inherited from Romantics, but are based on observations of real life. His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrializing Paris during the mid-nineteenth century. Baudelaire’s highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé, among many others. He is credited as the first Modernist and believed to have coined the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience.