Published on June 2, 2024 at 7:31 p.m. / Modified on June 2, 2024 at 7:32 p.m.
It was Baudelaire who founded European poetic modernity. He did it with a collection, The evil flowers, the first edition of which appeared in June 1857. The collection was the subject of a trial for insulting public morals, six of its pieces were condemned. Four years later, the volume reappeared, augmented by several poems which replaced the condemned pieces. It is the text of this second edition that literary posterity has consecrated.
So what was so revolutionary about these Flowers of Evil? Certainly not just the erotic poems dismissed by the justice system of the time. No, what was new, radically new, was first of all a place, Paris. For the first time in its history, poetry chose the city as its chosen site: “The deafening street around me screamed.” No one before Baudelaire had dared to make this street the site of a deeply personal speech. At the antipodes of all harmony, this street “screams”. The self that it deafens only suffers from it as it suffers elsewhere the “dark hurricane” of a “road” which pushes it aside as it pushes “people harassed with housework, / Grinded by work and tormented by age” that “the enormous Paris” has reduced to the status of “confused vomit.”
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