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 “cruel angel who lashes the suns” (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 Stéphane Mallarmé.
