Flowers of Evil

The most scandalous book of French poetry, published in 1857, got its author prosecuted for immorality and fined. Yet what the court called obscene was actually a map of the modern soul, drawn with surgical precision. Baudelaire mapped the dark corners of the human heart: alcoholism, hashish, doomed desire, the spleen of urban existence. He found beauty in what society condemned and traced the line between the angelic and the demonic in every stanza. Paris becomes a landscape of fog and gaslight, populated by women who are either salvation or destruction, by death pressing against the windowpane. This is not poetry of escape but of confrontation: with mortality, with boredom, with the terrible freedom of knowing one is damned. The Symbolists worshipped it as a bible. They understood that Baudelaire had invented a new kind of poetry for a world that had lost its innocence.