“Let old Plato look on you with an austere eye
With insidious glee, Baudelaire celebrates lesbian love that takes him to Greece, where the name of a place stood for its sexuality, and became a metaphor of Sapphic love. He condemns pleasure by plunging into its intensity like no one has done before or after him, except perhaps Arthur Rimbaud, on rare occasions.Īlso read: The Meaning of Despair in Louise Glück’s Poetry What is the hesitation of one woman acknowledging (and expressing) her love for another woman? Why does she ask if something is “strange” about her desire? What is her “confusion and… fright”? Baudelaire is an anti-sensual master of sensuality. I shudder with fear when you say: ‘My angel!’Īnd yet I feel my mouth moving toward you.” “Is there something strange in what we have done?Įxplain if you can my confusion and my fright: In Damned Women: Delphine and Hippolyta, Baudelaire writes: Beauty is what beauty does, and nothing can save us from its devouring force. The source, or origin, of beauty doesn’t matter. In Baudelaire, beauty is horror, and horror, beauty. Who cares? A dreadful, huge, ingenuous monster, you!” “Are you from heaven or hell, Beauty that we adore? The dark power of Baudelaire’s poetry in Les Fleur Du Mal/ The Flowers of Evil (originally published in 1857) is best experienced when it disturbs and is difficult to access, rather than when it is made more palatable through aesthetic appreciation and valorisation. A statement of horror is better understood by those who feel the horror in their bones, even if they react against it, than by those who express nothing but their rapture over the artistic achievement.” Not all of them, but a few, had a better understanding of it than many contemporary and subsequent admirers. Auerbach had “a word… in defense of certain critics who have resolutely rejected the book. In his celebrated essay on Charles Baudelaire, The Aesthetic Dignity of the ‘Fleurs du Mal’, the philologist, Erich Auerbach ended with a brilliant observation while addressing “the horror of Les Fleur Du Mal”. Today, April 9, marks the bicentenary of Charles Baudelaire’s birth anniversary.
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