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Flowers of Evil: Poems of Baudelaire
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1962
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May 25, 2026
Ah, such a scandalous text. So full of decay. So full of the beauty of darkness. Corpses, graveyards, sickness, exhaustion, obsession, urban filth, spiritual rot, doomed longing. He takes all the things polite society wants to keep hidden, the demimonde if you will, and drags them into the full light of the moon. As someone drawn to gothic atmosphere and the strange poetry of ruin, I cannot help but love parts of it.
His poems about artistry and poetic suffering especially struck me. There is something painfully familiar in his vision of the poet as a creature too sensitive for the ugliness of the world, wandering through modern life half cursed and half enchanted. Baudelaire understands obsession intimately. He understands melancholy as an entire aesthetic condition. The decadent languor, the fixation on death, the romanticising of despair, the feeling of carrying around a heart that bruises too easily.
And yet his views on women are particularly vile. To him, women are not real, they are not people. Women are corpses, temptresses, parasites, idols, flesh, pollution and moral collapse. They are cruel Goddesses, and tempting whores, and never anything in between. A little bit of the incel in the old world I guess.
Still there are poems which are deeply gothic and decadent, and those I do love, but I think I will always view Baudelaire with a deep and profound dislike.
His poems about artistry and poetic suffering especially struck me. There is something painfully familiar in his vision of the poet as a creature too sensitive for the ugliness of the world, wandering through modern life half cursed and half enchanted. Baudelaire understands obsession intimately. He understands melancholy as an entire aesthetic condition. The decadent languor, the fixation on death, the romanticising of despair, the feeling of carrying around a heart that bruises too easily.
And yet his views on women are particularly vile. To him, women are not real, they are not people. Women are corpses, temptresses, parasites, idols, flesh, pollution and moral collapse. They are cruel Goddesses, and tempting whores, and never anything in between. A little bit of the incel in the old world I guess.
Still there are poems which are deeply gothic and decadent, and those I do love, but I think I will always view Baudelaire with a deep and profound dislike.
Displaying 1 of 1 review