The Flowers of Evil

Book excerpt: 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