Death, Desire, and the City: Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil

Often described as the quintessential poetry collection of modernity, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) remains an intriguing, even shocking record of the new subjective experience of life in the modern metropolis, 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. He is a poet of the senses, of murmuration and temporal echoes — of the fast beat and splenetic slowness alike. This 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.

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 topics 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 feelings modern life intensifies — 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 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. Together these readings situate the collection within literary history while opening it onto questions of politics, desire, and form.

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 industrialization, lamenting and reflecting on the possibility of art within the logic of capitalism. One of the main questions we will seek to understand is how Baudelaire’s poetic vision was rooted in a novel investment in the senses and how a breakthrough could happen through sensorial excess, one that expanded the possibilities of the real and enabled an unprecedented self-awareness. These sensorial apprehensions alone could rupture the crushing sense of existential boredom, or ennui, so connected with the world of Baudelaire’s creations. And so, we will read his insightful essays on hashish, wine, and opium, to understand how altered perceptions brought about by inebriation and intoxication allowed Baudelaire to theorize a polarized relation with time and memory. On the one hand, there is the speed of city life; on the other, the slow dilation of consciousness appearing within the fleetingness of existence. Baudelaire was an accomplished and astute art critic: he wrote essays on the Salon exhibitions of Paris in 1845, 1846, and 1859. When appropriate, we will connect his art criticism, especially his writing on Delacroix and Constantin Guys, to the aesthetic ideals he sought to practice in his poetry.