The Flowers of Evil
1857
In 1857, a French court prosecuted Charles Baudelaire for obscenity. The verdict: six poems excised from his masterwork. A century and a half later, The Flowers of Evil still burns. This is poetry written from the abyss, where beauty and corruption entwine like lovers in a morgue. Baudelaire maps the modern city as a place of simultaneous enchantment and predation, its streets teeming with the deranged, the derelict, and the desperate. He searches for oblivion in wine and opium, chronicles loves forbidden by convention, and wages war against a God who made a world so rotten. The collection pulses with an electric tension: longing and revulsion, sacred and profane, spleen and ideal. This is the foundational text of modernism, the poet as outsider, the poem as confession and weapon. For anyone who wants literature that feels dangerous, that tastes like forbidden fruit and smells of absinthe and ash.
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“My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.””
— Charles Baudelaire
“I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight.””
— Charles Baudelaire
“The Poet is a kinsman in the cloudsWho scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.””
— Charles Baudelaire
“But the true voyagers are only those who leaveJust to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons,They never turn aside from their fatalityAnd without knowing why they always say: "Let's go!””
— Charles Baudelaire
“And yetto wine, to opium even, I preferthe elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;and in the wasteland of desireyour eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.””
— Charles Baudelaire
“Through the Unknown, we'll find the New””
— Charles Baudelaire
“Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.””
— Charles Baudelaire
“the Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love””
— Charles Baudelaire
“But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?””
— Charles Baudelaire
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Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-flowers-of-evil-43b2f8a3-780e-401b-a9df-736339b31c1e.Baudelaire, C. (1857). The Flowers of Evil. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-flowers-of-evil-43b2f8a3-780e-401b-a9df-736339b31c1eBaudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-flowers-of-evil-43b2f8a3-780e-401b-a9df-736339b31c1e.
