Charles Baudelaire was perhaps best known for being one of the cursed poets. His most famous piece "Les fleurs du mal" was partially censored and for the most part unaccepted during his lifetime. His revolutionary view of beauty, God, sin and poetry which transformed modern poetry was greatly unappriciated until well after his death. The official ban of "Les fleurs du mal" was not revoked until 1949, 92 years after it was first published. For more information about the progress and publication of "Les fleurs du mal" refer to the section on the main page.
Baudelaire wrote ?The Flowers of Evil? not only as a collection of individual poems but as a sequence of poems which relate to each other in order and bring the reader to an understanding of Baudelaire?s quest for the ideal. Different than classical poetry, Baudelaire attempts to find beauty in the malignant and evil objects. Beauty and sin are often ironically placed in a juxtaposition throughout many of his poems. The search for beauty in things such as death, sin and suffering begin with the basic concept of the spleen and the ideal.
The spleen represents all that is evil in the world. Death, destruction, suffering, pain, death. The spleen is the organ that filters out the bad things in your bloodstream. The ideal is an escape from reality. The ideal can consist of love, beauty, art, wine and opium. The ideal is a concept of beauty and an imagined state of happiness without the concept of time. Baudelaire is constantly disappointed however when the false idea of reality is constantly trumped by the spleen which is reality.
For example, Baudelaire writes early on in the first section which is titled ?The Ideal? about images of women and islands and flowers. In ?Exotic Perfume? Baudelaire speaks about a woman when he writes: ?I breathe the warm dark fragrance of your breast, before me blissful shores unfold, caressed by dazzling fires from blue unchanging skies.?
The women acts as an intermediary into the ideal. Suddenly the narrator breathes the woman?s fragrance and becomes intoxicated. From here he is elevated to a feeling of happiness. In the ideal, the woman can bring a man to God (heaven). Similar to the images in ?Exotic Perfume,? Baudelaire likens beauty to wine in the poem before it. This comparison of beauty and wine is understood because both beauty and wine are objects of the ideal. Wine which makes a person drunk leads them to a temporary intoxication--it is an escape from reality. So is beauty and love. In the early poems this is not revealed but just as the intoxication of wine wears off, so does love.
In the poem ?The Carrion,? Baudelaire reveals an image of a rotten animal on the side of the road in a thick heat. In the fourth stanza, flower is placed in a juxtaposition with stink. ?Blooming with the richness of a flower, and that almighty stink which corpses wear.? (Baudelaire 38) This contrast is a subtle hint at the irony between the idea that beauty can be placed aside death. Baudelaire becomes anxious about death and realizes that love has a finite nature and is like all other things--overtaken by the spleen. Where in the ideal, love is everlasting; in reality, love is a progression that ends in death.
To Baudelaire the progression begins with intoxication, then to conflict, then revulsion and finally suffering and death. In the poems final three stanza?s, the narrator explains that his lover will also become the foul smelling and decaying corpse, thus bringing the cycle to its completion.
The ?luscious fruits amid fantastic trees,? (31) which Baudelaire hopes to find in ?Exotic Perfume? do not exist in reality. They exist only in the ideal.
The Carrion is the real flower of the world. Where in the ideal, love brings one closer to God, in reality love brings one closer to death and Satan. A woman?s kiss becomes poison in his poem ?Poison.? By the end of the first two sections Baudelaire brings the reader to believe that death and suffering are the ultimate end in the real world and that we can not survive the spleen as it always overtakes the ideal.
Charles Baudelaire?s ?Revolt? Collection of The Flowers of Evil is essentially a transition leading into his theme of death. In the poem, ?The Denial of Saint Peter,? Baudelaire is reminding God of his own crucifixion: ?Jesus, remember, in the olive trees-- / In all simplicity you prayed afresh / To One whom your own butchers seemed to please / In hammering the nails into your flesh? (Baudelaire 167). Baudelaire wants God to remember the pain and agony that he experienced. This poem is all about misery and understanding that death will certainly overcome all. God?s misery corresponds to Baudelaire?s misery as a lonely poet always seeking an escape. This escape is a revolt against Baudelaire?s reality, hence the title. Baudelaire?s continuous rebellion against Catholicism is evident in the following passage of the same poem: ?I am quite satisfied to leave so bored / A world, where dream and action disunite. / I?d use the sword, to perish by the sword. / Peter denied his Master?...He did right!? (Baudelaire 168). Saint Peter feverishly wished to defend his master by force at the crucifixion but was forbidden to do so by the people. He denied Christ and was filled with sorrow for his fear and cowardice. Peter later became head of the Apostles at the request of his master, Christ, by means of forgiveness. Saint Peter prevailed as is suggested in Baudelaire?s text, and perhaps there is hope in this wretched world in which we live. The former part of the aforementioned passage suggests that Baudelaire is willing to leave a world where he cannot connect the real and the surreal.
Baudelaire concludes his journey through Les fleurs du mal with his chapter entitled Le mort or Death. This section, consisting of only six poems, marks the end of his struggle with le spleen and l?id?al and his acceptance that death is the only hope for escape from the spleen. Poems such as ?The Death of Lovers,? ?The Death of the Poor,? ?The Death of Artists,? and ?The End of the Day,? all lead up to his final poem, ?The Voyage.?
Through ?The Voyage,? Baudelaire sums up his conclusion that death is truly all that exists in the world, and it is our only hope for escape from the evil and malignance of the spleen. By speaking to these voyagers, who are all traveling to distant lands to witness different things, Baudelaire is also insisting that we find beauty in unusual places, particularly in those evil and terrible forces that are really the only permanent things that we have in life. His last line, ??who cares? Through the unknown, we find the new,? (trans. Robert Lowell), is essentially a call to arms?a call for the search for beauty in death, wickedness, and evil?
After all, love is fleeting?before you know it, the beautiful woman that you once held in your arms will merely be a decaying corpse, whose lips are kissed by worms.
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