If Baudelaire is seen as the prophet of modernity, it is no doubt because his lyrics can be read as asking how one can experience or come to terms with the modern world and as offering poetic consciousness as a solution—albeit a desperate one, requiring a passage through negativity.

IV

But this model does not exhaust The Flowers of Evil. Baudelaire’s irony often works in a different way, without involving the dramatization of the ironic attitude of a speaker. Frequently, for example, irony results from readers’ perceptions of discrepancies between poems: it is not so much that a speaker is being ironic as that the formulations of one poem undercut or ironically frame those of another. For example, the opening poem of ‘Spleen and the Ideal’, ‘Benediction’, recounts the birth of the poet, his persecution by his mother and wife, and his presumption that these sufferings are the price of glory and that God will, of course, make him a halo of pure light, far outshining earth’s richest jewels. In a prose poem, Baudelaire writes ironically of the poet losing his halo as he dashes across a muddy street and deciding not to advertise for its return—a more modern attitude, no doubt. Alerted by this text and by the self-consciousness of others, one can notice odd things about ‘Benediction’: while the poet of ‘To the Reader’ claimed, in a convincing conclusion, to be the twin of or brother to the hypocrite reader, the poet described in the very next poem, ‘Benediction’, has no relation to earthly readers. A parody of the visionary poet, he pays no attention to what happens around him and nothing earthly is good enough for him. The blinding light of his majestic intellect, we are told, blots out the sight of angry mortals, such as his wife and mother. This poet, one realizes, could not have written this poem, much of whose energy comes from its representation of the fury and plottings of mother and wife; therefore, one can scarcely accept as gospel the poem’s account of the poet. It seems to present a traditional myth of the poet, which will be gradually undercut by the actual workings of the poems of The Flowers of Evil.

The fourth poem in the collection, ‘Correspondences’, is often read as Baudelaire’s affirmation of a traditional notion: that the poet’s task is to convey correspondences between things terrestrial and celestial, revealing the spiritual significance of earthly matters. In fact, the poem gives us a much stranger, more uncertain vision. A literal translation of the opening quatrains would read: ‘Nature is a temple where living pillars often let emerge confused words; man passes through forests of symbols which observe him with familiar looks. Like long echoes which heard from afar are confused together in a shadowy and profound unity, as vast as night and as luminescence, smells, colours, and sounds answer one another.’ Compared with poems of Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, which asserted that nature was a temple, in that each thing testified to the glory of God, Baudelaire’s version is an ironic, potentially demystifying reflection on this tradition and on the notion of poet as decipherer of spiritual significance.9

Another important feature of Baudelaire’s verse which is not reducible to the experience of a subject or consciousness is its use of personification or abstract agents to establish dramas of meaning. I can experience anguish but if Anguish plants its black flag in my bowed skull, as happens in the fourth ‘Spleen’ poem, this is not the experience of a subject but a risky attempt to describe problems of the human condition more powerfully by abandoning the level of individual experience for a different kind of narrative. This sort of writing has often been called allegorical, but that term simplifies rather than clarifies the strange procedures of Baudelairian verse, which we observed earlier: in ‘Dusk’ a series of most diverse protagonists—the demons who get up heavily like businessmen, Prostitution which lights up in the streets, and the robbers and whores who go about their business—converge in a special linguistic space. In these non-realistic narratives we find operating a host of Baudelairian figures: Evil, Ennui, Spleen, Pain, Demons, and, perhaps most important, the Devil himself.

V

The Devil—here is one thing that makes Baudelaire seem scarcely modern. Surely the Devil is an archaic myth, an outmoded piece of mythological machinery, no longer taken very seriously even by practising Christians. What can an enlightened religion do with a scrawny red man with horns, hooves, tail, and pitchfork? But the opening poem of The Flowers of Evil, ‘To the Reader’, firmly declares, ‘Truly the Devil pulls on all our strings!’ and ‘Close, swarming, like a million writhing worms, | A demon nation [un peuple de Démons] riots in our brains’. Baudelaire considered himself a Catholic, but his Catholicism is most unorthodox (others consider him a heretic, a Christian without Christ). The poems frequently play upon religious imagery, but the clearest sign of religion in his poetry and prose is the Devil. Modern critics who concur on little else seem to agree that this side of Baudelaire—the Baudelaire of Satan, Demons, and Evil with a capital E—is of little interest or importance, not part of Baudelaire’s and our modernity but the stale remnant of a gothic Romanticism which boldly invoked infernal powers. This consensus suggests, at the very least, that there might be something disquieting at issue in this aspect of Baudelaire’s poetry and that we should at least ask about the significance of the Devil in what are, after all, ‘The Flowers of Evil’.

‘To the Reader’ tells us that we are puppets of Satan: he holds the strings that move us.

On evil’s pillow lies the alchemist,

Satan Thrice-Great, who lulls our captive soul,

And all the richest metal of our will

Is vaporized by his hermetic arts.

Sometimes he makes us act, sometimes prevents us from having the will to act as we would. The first seven stanzas of ‘The Irremediable’ present a series of images of human oppression and entrapment which, the poem suggests, illustrate Satan’s effectiveness:

Pure emblems, a perfect tableau

Of an irremediable evil,

Which makes us think that the Devil

Does well what he chooses to do!

But the phrase ‘makes us think’ leaves open the possibility that we may be mistaken. Perhaps the Devil isn’t really responsible for these disasters and entrapments after all. Since the poem immediately proceeds to speak of the ‘Sombre and limpid tête-à-tête | Of a heart become its own mirror’, it is possible that the earlier images show not the Devil’s ubiquity but the heart’s power of projection. What is most diabolical about the Devil, we might say, is that we can never be sure when he is at work. ‘He swirls around me like a subtle breeze’, says the speaker of ‘Destruction’, the opening poem of the section ‘Flowers of Evil’. I swallow him; he inspires eternal and guilty desires; he leads me into the plains of Ennui. Sometimes he takes ‘a woman’s form—most perfect, most corrupt’. Elsewhere Baudelaire speaks of love as a ‘Satanic religion’ and of an ‘ineluctable Satanic logic’ whereby fleshly pleasure leads to the delights of crime.