“The utmost example of modern poetry in all languages” (T. S. Eliot), “the last lyrical work that had European resonance” (Walter Benjamin), is what they said about The Flowers.
By replacing nature with the city, and ethics and ideals with the imposing form of Evil, Baudelaire reverses urban values: the poet and the book become a threat. The “Dante of our fallen age,” this last classical and first modern poet, writes his lyrical epic with protagonists of prostitutes, beggars, scavengers, morbidly in love individuals, death lovers, and opium addicts.
Figures of prohibitions and extremes, excluded from the social fabric, yet an inseparable part of it, traverse the dimly lit Paris with gas lamps, loving each other in scented chambers, and are sick with nostalgia.
The sensual, passionate woman of every age is the main heroine of this limbo. However, this unprecedented and bizarre nighttime spectacle was emphasized with the strictest metrical rules, articulated in the lyrical forms of classicism.
By merging the ancient with the modern, the fleeting with the eternal, the worthless with the invaluable, Baudelaire redefined lyricism by making modernity a fundamental ingredient of the new aesthetic, thus giving birth to symbolism, but primarily to modern (European) poetry: to Mallarmé and Rimbaud.
