Baudelaire: Writer of Modern Life

Often described as the quintessential poetry collection of modernity, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) remains an intriguing, even shocking response, to the new subjective experience of life in a sprawling city within a world of fractured beliefs and unstable grand narratives. Baudelaire’s poetic persona descends into the streets and looks head-on into the eyes of strangers: the fleeting passersby that punctuate each city dweller’s life. This infamous collection was first published in 1857 to scandal and controversy that ended in a court order demanding the expurgation of several poems deemed obscene. It was republished in expanded form in 1861 and finally reprinted a third time one year after the poet’s death.

As Walter Benjamin wrote: “Baudelaire placed shock experience at the very center of his art.” He did so to record and study the new conditions of life ushered in by the development of capitalism and industrialization. Baudelaire’s poems both lament and reflect on the possibility of art within the logic of capitalist production, while simultaneously calling attention to the unmoored ethical landscapes of a world without God—or where God manifests itself as the abyss of uncertainty within individual experience.

Together we will read the most extensive version of The Flowers of Evil in Richard Howard’s award-winning translation, while referencing the French original; however, knowledge of French is not necessary or required. We will examine how Baudelaire’s collection forever altered ideas about lyric poetry, its subjects and its relation to subjective experience, and focus on the novel ways Baudelaire reshaped the cultural understanding of what a poem does, and how lyric poetry responds to urbanization, modernity, and the gamut of feelings that modern life intensifies—such as boredom, alienation, loneliness. We will examine the figure of the flâneur and the political and historical vision in this poetic work, its treatment of desire and memory, and the existential and religious critiques one may extrapolate from these poems. As we read through The Flowers of Evil, we will also consider influential responses to Baudelaire’s poems from Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Paul Valéry, Leo Bersani, T.S. Eliot, and Erich Auerbach. From psychoanalytic to Marxist perspectives, we will read the collection in its relation to (and transformation of) literary history.