The Flowers of EvilCharles BaudelaireOmniClassics · Literature
The Flowers of Evil
Charles BaudelaireBeauty, desire, spiritual aspiration, and disgust meet in poems that refuse to keep elevated feeling separate from troubling experience.
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About the book
Cyril Scott's English verse selection introduces Baudelaire through poems concerned with the poet's vocation, the senses, remembered intimacy, melancholy, and death. The speakers often reach towards an ideal while remaining conscious of disappointment or corruption, giving an image of beauty an unstable emotional charge. Music, scent, weather, and urban encounter become ways of connecting outward impressions with inward states. The sequence includes such pieces as Hymn to Beauty, Invitation to a Journey, Spleen, and To a Passer-by, but it is a selection rather than a claim to reproduce the entire French collection. Reading slowly allows the changes of address and tone to emerge. These poems do not simply praise or condemn their subjects; they repeatedly expose attraction to its own contradictions.
- Beauty and unease
- Desire
- Melancholy
Why read it
For concentrated poems in which sensuous images carry conflicting impulses rather than a single settled mood.
Selected poems translated into English verse by Cyril Scott