Les Fleurs du mal

The subtractive test on a body of 126 poems has two parts: does the sequence require its sections, and does each section require its poems. The sections pass. Take away “Tableaux parisiens” and the book loses the city, where its spleen is given a world; take away “La Mort” and “Bénédiction” has no answer. The poems do not all pass. “Le Vin” is the weakest section: “L’Âme du vin” and “Le Vin des chiffonniers” are good, “Le Vin du solitaire” and “Le Vin des amants” slight. Poems such as “Le Mauvais Moine”, “La Muse vénale”, “Bohémiens en voyage”, “Châtiment de l’orgueil” and “Le Flambeau vivant” could go without the book noticing: perhaps an eighth to a sixth of the whole. The design is required; not every poem in it is.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the modern self lives in complicity with what it condemns, its master vice is not lust or cruelty but boredom, and the reader shares it. “Au lecteur” names the vice, “C’est l’Ennui!”, “It is Boredom!”, and ends on the charge “Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!”
“Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother!”. Beside it the book discloses a second condition: that the great city makes a new kind of experience, the stranger passed once and not seen again, and the grief of a world that changes faster than a heart can follow. Spleen could be read as a mood; the book refuses that reading by giving it causes, objects and a moral structure. Held off the top by the self-dramatising strain in the Satanism of “Révolte”, which states more than it discloses.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Height and frequency both. The elevations come warm: “Le Balcon”, “Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses”, “Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses”; “L’Invitation au voyage”, with its refrain of order and beauty, luxury, calm and pleasure. They come dreadful: the fourth “Spleen”, where the low and heavy sky weighs “comme un couvercle”, “like a lid”, and Hope weeps while Anguish plants its black flag in the bowed skull. “Une Charogne” reaches terror and tenderness at once in the turn to the beloved, “Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure”, “And yet you will be like this filth”. “Les Phares”, “Harmonie du soir”, “Les Sept Vieillards”, “Le Cygne” and the close of “Le Voyage” rise in turn. Few lyric bodies in any language rise this often. Held from the very top by the flatter stretches of “Spleen et Idéal” and by “Le Vin”.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Myth built, not only evoked. The order of 1861 makes the book a descent and a voyage: the poet cursed at birth by his mother in “Bénédiction”; the exiled creature of “L’Albatros”, “Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher”, “His giant’s wings prevent him from walking”; the fall through spleen; the city as an underworld, where seven identical old men file past as if out of hell; the false paradise; revolt with Cain and Satan; and death as the captain of the last voyage. In “Le Cygne” a swan escaped from a menagerie, dragging its wings in the dust of the Carrousel, becomes Andromache in exile, and the figure carries weight: exile is the poem’s argument. Held a step down because the Satanic poems summon myth more than they build it, and the beloveds are emblems as often as persons.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The inheritance was the Romantic lyric of Lamartine, Hugo, Musset and Vigny, and the formal impeccability of Gautier, to whom the book is dedicated. Baudelaire kept the alexandrine and the sonnet and filled them with what the lyric had excluded: carrion, the prostitute, the gambling den, the drunk ragpicker, lesbian love, a litany to Satan, and the bored self that enjoys its own wound, “Je suis la plaie et le couteau!”
“I am the wound and the knife!” (“L’Héautontimorouménos”). The swerve is the pairing: classical form held against the modern city and the modern vice. The stake was paid in full: prosecution, conviction, six poems struck, a fine, and the name of a pornographer that followed him to his death. Held off the top because the form itself is conservative; the formal departure came in the prose poems, which are not part of this book.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Change the form and the work stops knowing something. The strict line is the instrument: the order of the alexandrine and the closure of the sonnet press against disorder, decay and boredom, and the tension between them is what the poems know. “Harmonie du soir”, whose repeated lines circle back like the waltz and the incense it names, “Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!”, “Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!”, knows its theme only through that recurrence. The second level is the architecture of 1861, which turns a body of lyrics into a trajectory: the arrangement carries an argument, the descent and the voyage, that the poems taken singly do not. Held below the top because the architecture is loose in the middle of “Spleen et Idéal”, and because many poems would lose little in another regular form.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Evidence, not promise. Over a century and a half the book has sustained readings that do not exhaust one another: Valéry’s “Situation de Baudelaire” (1924), Proust’s essay, Eliot’s essay (1930), Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire and the city of the Second Empire, Sartre’s Baudelaire (1947), Auerbach on the book’s aesthetic dignity, Bonnefoy, and the scholarly edition of Claude Pichois. Each found a different book: the poet of correspondences, the poet of the crowd and the commodity, the moralist of sin, the man of bad faith, the classical craftsman. The poems hold on return at the level of the line as well: “Correspondances”, “La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles”, “Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes let out confused words”, is still argued over both as theory and as poem.

Score: 9.4 / 10

The field is the French lyric of the nineteenth century and, by its reach, the poetry of Europe after it. The force is a reorganisation of what lyric poetry could take as its matter and its stance: the city, the crowd, boredom and the complicit reader enter the lyric as its centre, not its margin, and the modern idea of a beauty drawn from the ugly and the transient takes its first full form here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in French, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and the whole Symbolist and Decadent line; beyond French, Swinburne, Stefan George, who translated the book, the Russian Symbolists, Rilke, and Eliot, who set “Hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable, mon frère!” into The Waste Land. Modern poetry in Europe is commonly dated from this book, and few books of any century moved their field further.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text of 1861 survives whole and settled, with no fragment, no recovered text and no crux of consequence. The court removed six poems from the book of 1857, but the edition of 1861 never held them, and the six themselves survived in Les Épaves (Brussels, 1866) and in every complete edition since; the charge on form is nil. Presence: continuous since publication, taught in French schools and universities, in the Pléiade, translated into every major language and repeatedly into English, quoted in common speech. That is the widest presence a span of a hundred and sixty-five years can show, and it earns the tenth above the usual figure, and no more: the book does not stand level with texts that have lasted millennia.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Judged on the French. The command of the line is at its highest in the great poems: the weight of the alexandrine and the placing of its caesura, rhyme used as argument, the sonnet’s turn, the long syntax that runs through the quatrains of “Le Cygne”, the varied measure and refrain of “L’Invitation au voyage”, “Mon enfant, ma sœur, / Songe à la douceur”
“My child, my sister, / think of the sweetness”. The making carries weight: the impeccability is what lets the matter shock rather than merely offend. The command is not even across 126 poems. Some lean on capitalised abstractions, stock apostrophe and the exclamation mark, and some rhymes are forced. The finest gradations of the French metre are not judged here past what can be heard with certainty, and nothing is charged for that.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Take the two most distant poles: the order, luxury and calm of “L’Invitation au voyage” and the rotting carcass of “Une Charogne”; or the compassion of “Les Petites Vieilles” and the revolt of “Les Litanies de Satan”, “Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!”, “O Satan, take pity on my long misery!”. They obey one law: the double pull toward the ideal and toward the abyss, in a soul for whom boredom is the ground state and beauty is wrung from what decays. “Le Voyage” restates the law at the end, “Une oasis d’horreur dans un désert d’ennui!”, “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!”, and its last line answers “Au lecteur”. The range is wide and the law holds. Held a little lower by “Le Vin”, whose genial or sentimental drinking sits loosely under it.

Score: 9.1 / 10

For a lyric body, much is held and integrated. Consciousness above all, in its moods, its memory, “J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans”, “I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old”, and its self-division; eros in several kinds; the city and its labour, its poor, its old women, its gamblers, its evening of thieves and workers in “Le Crépuscule du soir”; history, in the rebuilding of Paris and the exile of “Le Cygne”; the sacred, inverted but present from “Bénédiction” to “Le Reniement de saint Pierre”; nature as a temple of signs; death. What holds the axis here, the lowest of the twelve: the family is thin, the cursing mother and the servant of “La servante au grand cœur”; the state barely appears; and the natural order is present more as symbol than as world.

Score: 8.3 / 10