Les Fleurs du Mal

from Peter Gay. Modernism. The Lure of Heresy. From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (W. W. Norton, 2008)

What made Les Fleur Du Mal a founding document of modernism was, even more than its explicitness, Baudelaire’s ability to merge formal clarity and licentious subject matter, the strictest rule-bound sonnets and the grossest metaphors. …A conventional versifier may excel in his control, a libertine in his freedom; it was Baudelaire’s gift of joining technical control to emotional scope that made him so extraordinary a model for modernist poets. …

Through the decades, Baudelaire’s admirers would say over and over that his voice was the voice of poetry pure and simple. It offered no political, ethical, or religious program; it did not try to impress its readers with rhetorical flourishes; it emerged from feelings, not ideas. For Baudelaire, form was a vessel that receives substance to mold into an appropriate shape. He found, to borrow a phrase from one of his most consistent admirers, T. S. Eliot, an “objective correlative” for whatever he wanted—or perhaps better, needed—to express. It followed … that the morality or immorality of a poem depends not on its subject matter but on its treatment. (pp 39-40)

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