The women is shown as a source of beauty and bliss, and from the other side the poet describes the women as the source of coldness and viciousness. It's written in the poems that the material state is a state of transiency. In the other part of the cycle you can see the strength of an ideal love, the feeling of ecstasy and enthusiasm it brings but also the feelings of melancholy and gloominess. From the songs you can also witness the other side of the poets life where he is described as a beggar, martyr and a crazy man.

You can see the position of the artist in the society and the influence the society has in everyday life. 'Spleen and ideals' contains series of songs describing a new aesthetic program and new visions of art and beauty.

In it Baudelaire describes how a modern man goes to waste in a society of hypocrites describing it with aesthetics of ugliness.Įvery single of the 5 units has a significant meaning for the whole book, and every poem has a meaning for the unit. All of the most important motives are brought out in the first poem. The main and the biggest cycle is the first one named 'Spleen and ideals' that is consisted of 88 poems. The book is based on the introductory poem that is a dedication to the reader named 'To the reader' and on 28 compositions named 'Additional songs' that were not divided nor included in the already mentioned 6 cycles. The Flowers of Evil consist of over 160 poems that are divided into 5 units creating 6 cycles. When it comes to the form of the poems, we could say the book was written with strict rules. In todays analysis the book is not perceived as an immoral and shocking work and does not get many negative responses. Instead of them he decided to write about darker themes in his book of poems. Baudelaire wanted to torture the readers with his poems because they were used to reading nice verses that made their, in Baudelaires opinion, pretty but hypocrite lives even better.īaudelaire was not the kind of artist who wanted to write poems about beauty and an uplifted spirit. The Flowers of Evil was written for 15 years but at that time the book was not well accepted and became recognized as a work of art many years later. Four years later the book was published again but this time they've cut out all of the parts that could endanger public morality.

He was also punished for some parts of this, at that time, misunderstood and immoral book. Charles Baudelaire was a great but yet unaccepted poet of that time.

The flowers of evil charles baudelaire