The Flowers of Evil

Read the first poem and Baudelaire reaches out of the page to name you: "Hypocrite reader, my fellow, my brother." Before a single flower has bloomed you are implicated, a fellow citizen of the boredom and the appetite the book is about to anatomise. What follows is not a scatter of lyrics but a built cathedral of them, climbing from Spleen and Ideal up through the gaslit Parisian streets, the wine, the flowers themselves, and at last Death. Baudelaire's genius is a kind of alchemy: he gathers the mud of the modern city, its hospitals and gutters and bought women and bottomless afternoons, and turns it to gold, refusing the old lie that beauty and corruption keep separate rooms. A French court convicted six of these poems of offending public morality, which only proved his point. He had dissolved the wall between the sacred and the squalid, and modern poetry walked through the gap he left.