The Flowers of Evil

Charles Baudelaire is a modern poet. With his jokey tone of high seriousness careening wildly into purple prose, he sees the task before him of the inversion of a monarchical Christian Classicism into Satanic Modernism. Perverts, rogues, outcasts are family to him.

With hard work, at times absurdly, he attends to this new position of his invention, ironic high priest of a new flock. Yet his own internal attitude is ambivalent. He is channeling, a shaman. His assessment of the times, for the most part, with the nobility of a magician, he keeps deliberately muted. His Satanism is a means to see a change in value, an art strategy. It is not literal.

His symbolism is nuanced and sophisticated, despite a mock-comic delivery, preposterous intonation. Grounded in material objects, luxury commodities and those of the day to day, his symbols are mostly borrowed from the marketplace. They are only assigned poetic, magical purpose via the not-so-mystical vagaries of mood and psychology. Mood is often equated to recreational substances, drugs, booze. But especially the hormonal waft of sex. He reads Edgar Allan Poe a lot.

Most of his "career" is spent revising one book. He devotes himself to itemizing the crowded vistas, both material and mental, of the modern city dweller.

Here are the multiple versions of Flowers of Evil which appeared during the course of Baudelaire's life. Both in the original French and in multiple English translations.