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    The Flowers Of Evil: “Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
    The Flowers Of Evil: “Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
    The Flowers Of Evil: “Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
    Ebook95 pages2 hours

    The Flowers Of Evil: “Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”

    By Charles Baudelaire

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    About this ebook

    Charles Pierre Baudelaire was born on April 9 1821 in Paris to an amateur artist mother and professional father. His father died when Charles was 6 but his mother remarried shortly after to Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick who later became a prominent ambassador. Consequently Charles received a good education and was encouraged to enter the legal profession by both parents but instead wanted to pursue the life of the writer and had already developed an appetite, whilst studying law, for prostitutes and alcohol that inevitably led to debt and his parents disapproval. Baudelaire's literary published work began with well received art reviews and essays. He was a pioneering translator which included the works of Edgar Allan Poe but his most remarkable, famous and memorable works was his poetry and in particular his volume entitled The Flowers of Evil ('Les Fleurs du Mal'). The principal subject of these innovative styled poems about the changing nature of beauty in the modern industrialised Paris were sex and death and included lost innocence, lesbianism, alcohol, depression and urban corruption. This work created a huge controversy that led to the successful prosecution of both Baudelaire and his publisher for creating an offense against public morals. However, the book did find an appreciative audience including Victor Hugo who wrote to Baudelaire: 'Your fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars... I applaud your vigorous spirit with all my might'. The poems were hugely influential and in 1949 the judgement was officially reversed and Baudelaire recognised for his incredible talent. He died within a year of suffering a severe stroke on 31st August, 1867 and was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopyright Group
    Release dateJan 13, 2015
    ISBN9781785430534
    The Flowers Of Evil: “Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
    Author

    Charles Baudelaire

    Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a French poet. Born in Paris, Baudelaire lost his father at a young age. Raised by his mother, he was sent to boarding school in Lyon and completed his education at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he gained a reputation for frivolous spending and likely contracted several sexually transmitted diseases through his frequent contact with prostitutes. After journeying by sea to Calcutta, India at the behest of his stepfather, Baudelaire returned to Paris and began working on the lyric poems that would eventually become The Flowers of Evil (1857), his most famous work. Around this time, his family placed a hold on his inheritance, hoping to protect Baudelaire from his worst impulses. His mistress Jeanne Duval, a woman of mixed French and African ancestry, was rejected by the poet’s mother, likely leading to Baudelaire’s first known suicide attempt. During the Revolutions of 1848, Baudelaire worked as a journalist for a revolutionary newspaper, but soon abandoned his political interests to focus on his poetry and translations of the works of Thomas De Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe. As an arts critic, he promoted the works of Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, composer Richard Wagner, poet Théophile Gautier, and painter Édouard Manet. Recognized for his pioneering philosophical and aesthetic views, Baudelaire has earned praise from such artists as Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel Proust, and T. S. Eliot. An embittered recorder of modern decay, Baudelaire was an essential force in revolutionizing poetry, shaping the outlook that would drive the next generation of artists away from Romanticism towards Symbolism, and beyond. Paris Spleen (1869), a posthumous collection of prose poems, is considered one of the nineteenth century’s greatest works of literature.

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      Book preview

      The Flowers Of Evil - Charles Baudelaire

      The Flowers Of Evil by Charles Baudelaire

      Charles Pierre Baudelaire was born on April 9 1821 in Paris to an amateur artist mother and professional father.  His father died when Charles was 6 but his mother remarried shortly after to Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick who later became a prominent ambassador.  Consequently Charles received a good education and was encouraged to enter the legal profession by both parents but instead wanted to pursue the life of the writer and had already developed an appetite, whilst studying law, for prostitutes and alcohol that inevitably led to debt and his parents disapproval.

      Baudelaire's literary published work began with well received art reviews and essays.  He was a pioneering translator which included the works of Edgar Allan Poe but his most remarkable, famous and memorable works was his poetry and in particular his volume entitled The Flowers of Evil ('Les Fleurs du Mal'). 

      The principal subject of these innovative styled poems about the changing nature of beauty in the modern industrialised Paris were sex and death and included lost innocence, lesbianism, alcohol, depression and urban corruption.

      This work created a huge controversy that led to the successful prosecution of both Baudelaire and his publisher for creating an offense against public morals.

      However, the book did find an appreciative audience including Victor Hugo who wrote to Baudelaire: 'Your fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars... I applaud your vigorous spirit with all my might'.  The poems were hugely influential and in 1949 the judgement was officially reversed and Baudelaire recognised for his incredible talent.

      He died within a year of suffering a severe stroke on 31st August, 1867 and was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery.

      Index Of Contents

      The Dance of Death

      The Beacons

      The Sadness of the Moon

      Exotic Perfume

      Beauty

      The Balcony

      The Sick Muse

      The Venal Muse

      The Evil Monk

      The Temptation

      The Irreparable

      A Former Life

      Don Juan in Hades

      The Living Flame

      Correspondences

      The Flask

      Reversibility

      The Eyes of Beauty

      Sonnet of Autumn

      The Remorse of the Dead

      The Ghost

      To a Madonna

      The Sky

      Spleen

      The Owls

      Bien Loin d'Ici

      Music

      Contemplation

      To a Brown Beggar-maid

      The Swan

      The Seven Old Men

      The Little Old Women

      A Madrigal of Sorrow

      The Ideal

      Mist and Rain

      Sunset

      The Corpse

      An Allegory

      The Accursed

      La Beatrice

      The Soul of Wine

      The Wine of Lovers

      The Death of Lovers

      The Death of the Poor

      The Benediction

      Gypsies Travelling

      Francisco Meæ Laudes

      Robed in a Silken Robe

      A Landscape

      The Voyage

      Charles Baudelaire, As Essay on His Life and Career by James Huneker

      THE DANCE OF DEATH

      Carrying bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves,

      Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves

      With all the careless and high-stepping grace,

      And the extravagant courtesan's thin face.

      Was slimmer waist e'er in a ball-room wooed?

      Her floating robe, in royal amplitude,

      Palls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod

      With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod.

      The swarms that hum about her collar-bones

      As the lascivious streams caress the stones,

      Conceal from every scornful jest that flies,

      Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyes

      Are made of shade and void; with flowery sprays

      Her skull is wreathed artistically, and sways,

      Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebræ.

      O charm of nothing decked in folly! they

      Who laugh and name you a Caricature,

      They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure,

      The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone

      That is most dear to me, tall skeleton!

      Come you to trouble with your potent sneer

      The feast of Life! or are you driven here,

      To Pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir

      And goad your moving corpse on with a spur?

      Or do you hope, when sing the violins,

      And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins,

      To drive some mocking nightmare far apart,

      And cool the flame hell lighted in your heart?

      Fathomless well of fault and foolishness!

      Eternal alembic of antique distress!

      Still o'er the curved, white trellis of your sides

      The sateless, wandering serpent curls and glides.

      And truth to tell, I fear lest you should find,

      Among us here, no lover to your mind;

      Which of these hearts beat for the smile you gave?

      The charms of horror please none but the brave.

      Your eyes' black gulf, where awful broodings stir,

      Brings giddiness; the prudent reveller

      Sees, while a horror grips him from beneath,

      The eternal smile of thirty-two white teeth.

      For he who has not folded in his arms

      A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms,

      Recks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent,

      When Horror comes the way that Beauty went.

      O irresistible, with fleshless face,

      Say to these dancers in their dazzled race:

      "Proud lovers with the paint above your bones,

      Ye shall taste death, musk-scented skeletons!

      Withered Antinous, dandies with plump faces,

      Ye varnished cadavers, and grey Lovelaces,

      Ye go to lands unknown and void of breath,

      Drawn by the rumour of the Dance of Death.

      From Seine's cold quays to Ganges' burning stream,

      The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream;

      They do not see, within the opened sky,

      The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high.

      In every clime and under every sun,

      Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run;

      And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye

      And mingles with your madness, irony!"

      THE BEACONS

      RUBENS, oblivious garden of indolence,

      Pillow of cool flesh where no man dreams of love,

      Where life flows forth in troubled opulence,

      As airs in heaven and seas in ocean move,

      LEONARD DA VINCI, sombre and fathomless glass,

      Where lovely angels with calm lips that smile,

      Heavy with mystery, in the shadow pass,

      Among the ice and pines that guard some isle.

      REMBRANDT, sad hospital that a murmuring fills,

      Where one tall crucifix hangs on the walls,

      Where every tear-drowned prayer some woe distils,

      And one cold, wintry ray obliquely falls.

      Strong MICHELANGELO, a vague far place

      Where mingle Christs with pagan Hercules;

      Thin phantoms of the great through twilight pace,

      And tear their shroud with clenched hands void of ease.

      The

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