What are Baudelaire's Evil Flowers fraught with?

Contemporaries of the famous French poet Charles Baudelaire did not accept and did not understand him, considering this great poet to be dangerous and crazy. He lived only 46 years, but this did not stop him from giving the world a wonderful collection of poems.

Idea

Baudelaire’s poetry collection “Flowers of Evil” is a whole revelation, conceived by the author in his youth as a single work. It would seem that this is another collection, but all its parts are closely related and carry a common idea. It consists in the harmony and duality of our world: where there is good, there is evil, where there is happiness, there is a place of deep sadness. But what is remarkable, Baudelaire does not divide the world, as many are accustomed to do, into black and white, in his verses these antagonistic concepts flow into each other: Satan replaces God, and the call of the flesh becomes a blessed one. Baudelaire’s “Evil Flowers” ​​give us an understanding that evil and good can be the source of beauty in exactly the same way.

The images

One of the important places in the collection is the image of a woman - cheerful and sad, loving and cold as a statue, but they are all beautiful, and their charm haunts the poet. Baudelaire’s poems “Flowers of Evil” reveal the essence of beauty from different angles, the author discusses where she came from, whether she came down from heaven, or maybe rose from Hell. Not every reader is able to comprehend the secret, see between the lines, but imbued with the idea, he realizes that no matter what origin has beauty, it smooths the blows of fate and makes the world more beautiful. Who but a poet could best convey this? Baudelaire’s “Evil Flowers” ​​is not just a collection of separate verses, no, each creation is connected with others by a thin, but clear and strong thread. The poem "Albatross", located at the very beginning of the book, fell in love with many. The majestic bird in the sea heaven on the deck among cruel sailors becomes helpless and miserable. The pain and sadness of the author intensifies with each new line, in them he again and again describes the magnificence of the albatross. The sailors' amusement turns his huge wings into nothing, and he is unable to fly, he is doomed. Perhaps the author identified himself with this helpless bird: misunderstood, crushed, having lost the ability to fly - such is the fate of the poet in modern society.

Theme of Evil

Another poem from the collection “Flowers of Evil” by Baudelaire is “Abel and Cain,” written after the revolutionary events in France in the mid-19th century. He does not hesitate to call people to rebellion, in which he himself took part. Standing on the barricades, Baudelaire was guided primarily not by political worldviews, but by exclusively emotional impulses. The biblical idea seemed to be continued in this frank poem, and it is the Cain family that expresses the will of people to rebellion and rejection of the principles and orders of that time. The theme of Evil runs through the whole collection with a red thread, the author discusses the nature of Evil and reveals its different sides; it is not for nothing that this name was chosen. Flowers are always something beautiful and positive, and the word "evil" itself causes only negativity, Baudelaire hints at this contradiction. Flowers of Evil, a brief description of which is impossible, is worth reading in full, enjoying the combination of the incongruous, discovering new aspects of familiar concepts.