Here's a recent essay on Baudelaire from the trusty, always-interesting online mag The Millions:http://www.themillions.com/2013/04/th... So as to try to follow that, I've got to disclose a bit of an embarrassment. Baudelaire was, for me, the kind of poet only certain kinds of people liked. By this I don't mean Francophiles or the merely pretentious but there was something that set a devotee of C.B. apart from your average earnest, quavering, verbose, nervous poet or poetry fanboy. It's hard to put it into words- maybe you know it when you see it- but there was something sort of...elegant...and...removed...and...cynical about somebody who felt like carting around this haunted menagerie everywhere they went, the way you just do with your favorite poets... I'm no stranger to French poetry or literary bleakness, believe you me, but there was always something slightly creepy about Baudelaire, I could never put my finger on why I recoiled from it and what this meant. There's the languid, morbid Romanticism, fond of grand statements and magnificent imagery; the surgically precise mastery of rhyme and meter (I don't speak more than toddler's French but you can pretty much get a good sense of this stuff with the original text facing the English translations); the utterly bleak yet exotic, nigh- perfumed insights, metaphoric associations and twists of phrase; the poet's own (and those of his poetic subjects) addictions and rhapsodies; the deep, indescribable longings muddled with spleen; the detestation of smug comfort and propriety with the love of the 'perverse', the 'occult' and the melodious rumination mixed with ominous, pervading ennui... Well, call me a hardheaded New England Pragmatist, but there was something sort of suspiciously sickly about this guy. I mean, here I am, 11:22pm, feasting on my pauper's pleasures of potato salad, a rather stale corn muffin and a can of Sprite. I'm very ok with this. Not necessarily dying to be anywhere else or doing much else. I'm content, in my clean, well-lighted place down the street from the apt. I mean, haunted wonderlands are all well and good but in the words of Peter Griffin, SOMEBODY THROW A FREAKING PIE! My oldest friend, a fine poet and a dedicated teacher and a loving husband and father, just loved this stuff when we were growing up. Still does, in fact. It inspired him. I never quite got it- I mean, there's plenty to take from the poems AS poems but really, where does one relate? I wasn't outraged by Baudelaire, I was given the willies. I was just pretty definitively turned-off by an elaborately detailed, mockingly erotic poem about finding a maggot-teeming corpse, spreadeagled, in the middle of a spring stroll with your lover...I get it, I get it, but I'm gonna start slowly backing away now, ok?... I didn't get it, and I didn't even really want to. Now that's totally changed. I don't quite know why. I think it's got something to do with reading Walter Benjamin's interesting take on Baudelaire's style and literary achievement on a bus on the way to visit said friend. Nothing I like better than a fine and appreciative literary assessment. And I really love it when someone's insights turn my own around... So that planted the seed, as did time and experience. I'm not the same person I was when I first encountered poetry, not to mention life itself, and my tastes haven't changed in the sense of the old favorites, the lodestars, but they've definitely widened and evolved and been enriched and (I think) deepened. I think I'm aware of ironies more than I ever was, and unfulfillment, loss, dead air and lights that turn off. I've been dealing with a long string of anguish, disappointment, despair, confusion and frustration. Time has worn away some of the gilding from the world, and this is what some like to call 'experience'. Ok, well, sure, but so what? Well, Baudelaire's one of the so-whats. I never understood what his kind of visionary poetics really meant, what it did and where it brought the craft of poetry and the interested, open-minded reader. I think in some ways this is the kind of poetry that you need to grow into. Rimbaud works just fine when you're pissed off and rebellious and Promethean and you're 16, but he was a genius and his work survives real scrutiny and lasts after the humidity of adolescence cools off... Baudelaire (a poet Rimbaud admired, btw, no mean feat in and of itself) requires a little more out of you to really start to absorb, I've found. Everybody knows by now that he was into hashish and absinthe and that he had plenty of torrid affairs and that he blew through most of his inheritance on the finest linens and dandied it up something fierce... He also had quite the lover/mistress/muse/femme fatale, as The Daily Beast makes clear: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles... What I think I missed out on initially was the old soul that shifts and speaks within these tortured, skeptical, vivid, tastefully arranged and somehow gruesomely challenging poems. Baudelaire isn't interested in pissing off the stuffy, conventional reading public because he's a spoiled, creepy, brat it's because he has a vision of life (his own, his city's, etc) that just couldn't come across in any other guise. I'm making an ass of myself now, as per usual, so I'm going to stop bumbling down the explication road and just quote this poem in full. I'm not an expert or anything, but I definitely think that this poem is essential:ReversibilityAngel of gladness, do you know of anguish, Shame, of troubles, sobs, and of remorse, And the vague terrors of those awful nights That squeeze the heart like paper in a ball? Angel of gladness, do you know of pain? Angel of kindness, do you know of hatred, Clenched fists in the shadow, tears of gall, When Vengeance beats his hellish call to arms, And makes himself the captain of our will? Angel of kindness, do you know revenge? Angel of health, are you aware of Fevers Who by pallid hospitals' great walls Stagger like exiles, with the lagging foot, Searching for sunlight, mumbling with their lips? Angel of health, do you know of disease? Angel of beauty, do you know of wrinkles, Fear of growing old, the great torment To read the horror of self-sacrifice In eyes our avid eyes had drunk for years? Angel of beauty, do you know these lines? Angel of fortune, happiness and light, David in dying might have claimed the health That radiates from your enchanted flesh; But, angel, I implore only your prayers, Angel of fortune, happiness and light! I was reading this at work, looking out through the big windows and watching cold night full of pissing rain trembling in the puddles on the corner of the opposite side of the street, sky all black, stained yellow streetlights, city spaces, melancholic, churning... I think I get it now. Sometimes you have to pick the flowers yourself.
I read a majority of the poems in French, which made the experience more beautiful. Each word is like a unique brushstroke of color on a grand canvas, applied with varying degrees of pressure, and each deeply and sensually hued. Baudelaire’s poetry paints gorgeous images of emotion, desire, and wanting that remain with you. Reading Les fleurs was a deeply personal and stirring experience for me. I have many favorites and could provide analyses on a dozen poems or more, but for the sake of length, I will limit myself to one particularly poignant experience. Le Flacon was one of those poems that never left me, maybe because it was always a part of me. I love perfume, and I am an avid collector. I have perfumes that I've worn maybe once or twice, and I have perfumes that I wear every day. Sometimes, I get an inordinate amount of pleasure from re-arranging the bottles of perfume on the vanity table. Some of the happiness derives from the physical beauty of the arrangement; the glittering, multi-toned flasks of elaborate glass with gold- and silver-plated designs are the stuff of fantasy, a little treasure trove of beauty and fragility in my own room. But the other, more poignant happiness originates from the fragrance and the memories that accompany it. Some moments in life will always stay with you, and sometimes, that memory leaves not just a visual or emotional mark, but its own fragrance as well. My childhood home has a certain scent that will always define me and transport my thoughts to past. The ocean of the northwest has a wild, pungent smell that I associate with power and nature. The same goes for perfumes. One darkly colored flask that I use occasionally contains a deeply sensual tangerine and jasmine perfume that reminds me of a night years ago when the moon was big and red in the sky. I was by myself and sleepless, and nothing extraordinary happened, except that I feeling hyper-aware and happened to be wearing that perfume. Somehow, the surreal and rare vision of beauty in the night sky became associated with the fragrance of tangerine and jasmine. Another flask contains a fresh yet musky perfume, gifted to me when I lived in France. The person who gave me the perfume explained that this fragrance was popular with the young ladies these days, and perhaps I would share in the enthusiasm. I did. I wore it nearly every day for the remaining month I was in France, and though I have more than half the bottle left, when I take a whiff, I am reminded of the warm sun of Toulouse and Nice in the spring.Baudelaire understood this fascinating and unique joy--and when the memories are something you'd rather forget, pain. Le flacon is a reflection on memory, and how the past can be brought to life by something as simple as fragrance. Like memory, fragrance is powerful, porous (“II est de forts parfums pour qui toute matière / Est poreuse”). Even if hidden and stored away in the deep attic of your mind, once the flask is uncorked, the fragrance stirs to life things left forgotten (“on trouve un vieux flacon qui se souvient / D'où jaillit toute vive une âme qui revient”). Baudelaire’s imagery and use of words is gorgeous, but the emotion that he evokes is something very personal and very special. I didn't like all of Baudelaire's works, and I liked some more than the others. In the end, which poems you end up liking or disliking depend on personal taste and, to a degree, whim. But everyone should pick up Les fleurs du mal. It is a collection that should be read and appreciated.Note: If you do a Google search, you can find all of his poems online for free. Most sites feature the poems in French with various English translations accompanying it.
What do You think about Les Fleurs Du Mal (1983)?
I was so taken by this book that I memorized whole passages to repeat if only to myself at various times of the day. As I recall, my friends began to think I was mentally ill. Nevertheless, the power of this book was immense on my life as a college junior, I think, and it caused me to fall in love with everything that was French, cynical and wearing a beret, much like a Parisian waiter on his day off. I actually picked this book up because I loved the name, but it also began a long term love affair not only with Baudelaire, but Rimbaud and especially Verlaine. These poets literally opened up a new level of excitement in me for the depth at which the human spirit could both soar and sink, if one were truly willing to be led. I can still smell the acrid Gauloises cigarettes I smoked, but maybe that was just my imagination walking by the Seine so late at night and thinking these wonderful thoughts!
—Rhonda
My darling was naked, or nearly, for knowing my heartshe had left on her jewels, the bangles and chainswhose jingling music gave her the conquering airof a Moorish slave on days her master is pleasedWhenever I hear such insolent harmonies,that scintillating world of metal and stonebeguiles me altogether, and I am enthralledby objects whose sound is a synonym for lightFor there she lay on the couch, allowing herselfto be adored, a secret smile indulgingthe deep and tenacious currents of my lovewhich rose against her body like a tideEyes fixed on mine with the speculative glareof a half-tamed tiger, she kept altering posesand the incorporation of candor into lustgave new charms to her metamorphoses;calmly I watched, with a certain detachment at first,as the swanlike arms uncoiled, and the legs,the sleek thighs shifting, shiny as oil,the belly, the breasts -- that fruit on my vine -clustered, more tempting than wicked cherubim,to undermine what peace I had achieved,dislodging my soul from its rock-crystal throneof contemplation, once so aloof, so sereneAs if a new Genesis had been at work,I saw a boy’s torso joined to Antiope’s hips,belying that lithe waist by those wide loins...O the pride of rouge upon that tawny skin!And then, the lamp having given up the ghost,the dying coals made the only light in the room:each time they heaved another flamboyant sigh,they flushed that amber-colored flesh with blood!
—rose vibrations
My love of literature began at a young age, in part, with French literature. I loved translations of Alexander Dumas and when I grew past romantic adventures, I was entranced at the clinical realist precision of Balzac. I briefly dated a French woman in New York City who begged me to move with her to Marseilles where I would attend the University of Marseilles (she had magically already procured an application) at the expense of French taxpayers (what liberals call "universal education") so long as I learned to speak French in 9 months time. I never left the States and never learned French.However, if I did learn French, it would be mainly to read Baudelaire in the original. I doubt many readers picking this book up will be aware of the atom bomb it dropped on Paris when it was published. Reading it now it may still sound fresh, irreverent, decadent, and Satanic, but you have to multiply that by a factor of 100 to get the 19th century reaction. To add some perspective, this decadent evil little book of poems dealing with lesbianism, artifice, death, a dog corpse festering and open like the legs of a prostitute...this was circa the Civil War! Baudelaire was lucky he was only fined for "indecency" but a few of the poems were outlawed in France until (are you setting down?) 1949!I don't want to discuss the poems or do explications of them. Any serious poet should own this book. Baudelaire was a masterful poet, a brilliant critic, he was THE reason Edgar Allen Poe was introduced to the Continent via his translations, and he virtually threw his artistic back out writing these poems. He would never surpass them and would spend years editing the volume and perhaps basking in the rays of their infamy. Baudelaire is a prime example of quality over quantity. I will take Les Fleurs Du Mal over a dozen books of poetry from a lesser poet and he stands head and shoulders over his contemporaries. The French Symbolists were nebulous...rather like a Romantic poet who smoked too much opium. Baudelaire on the other hand, had a keen mind sharp as a knife and wrote verse that was outrageous in its subject matter as it is technically brilliant. You have the tenants of symbolism, the mysterious music of Nature, the sublime, the absinthe-fueled hallucinations, but they are there in Baudelaire with a wicked energy. There are a handful of books in modern times that have shocked. Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, a few others. One has to read Les Fleurs Du Mal with the understanding that it is among their company.
—Edward
