Flowers of Evil

Les Fleurs du mal is a collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire, encompassing almost all of his production in verse, from 1840 until his death at the end of August 1867. Flowers of Evil It is a major work of modern poetry. His pieces break with agreed style, in use until then and rejuvenate the structure of the verse by regular use of crossings, rejects and counter-rejects. This renovates the rigid form of the sonnet. He uses suggestive images by often making unprecedented associations, such as the "e;cruel angel who lashes the suns"e; (Le Voyage). He mixes scholarly language and everyday talk. Breaking with a romanticism which, for half a century, praised Nature to the point of trivializing it, it celebrates the city and more particularly Paris. This work differs from a classic collection, where often only chance brings together poems that are generally disparate. These are articulated with method and according to a precise plan, to sing with absolute sincerity: the suffering here below considered according to the Christian dogma of original sin, which implies atonement; disgust with evil - and often with oneself; obsession with death; the aspiration to an ideal world, accessible by mysterious correspondences. Nourished by physical sensations which memory acutely restores, the work expresses a new aesthetic where poetic art juxtaposes the moving palette of human feelings and lucid vision of a sometimes trivial reality of the most ineffable beauty. He will exert a considerable influence on later poets as eminent as Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine as well as Stephane Mallarme.