Thus poems 22-39 are the cycle of the ‘Black Venus’, a mulatto named Jeanne Duval, sometime prostitute, with whom Baudelaire lived on and off for most of his adult life; poems 40-48 form the cycle of the ‘White Venus’, Apollonie Sabatier, a celebrated beauty whose salon was a meeting place for artists and writers, and to whom Baudelaire anonymously sent a number of these poems; and poems 49-57, called the cycle of ‘the Green-eyed Venus’ have been linked to an actress named Marie Daubrun, whom Baudelaire pursued briefly in 1854-5 and again in 1859. As anyone reading these poems for the first time can see, the references to identifiable qualities of specific women are relatively rare. (Given the poems in a random order and asked to sort them into three groups, no one could come up with the groups we have; it is even hard to tell, without looking it up, where one cycle is supposed to end and another begin.)7 In using the figures of these three women to think about the poems of love, critics have obscured the tremendous variety of amorous relations dramatized by Baudelaire. It simply is not true that the Black Venus represents a sensual, sinful love, the White Venus an idealized, Platonic love, and the Green-Eyed Venus some combination of the two. Each group contains a variety of attitudes and relations (which is why critics have to speak of ‘cycles’—a word Baudelaire never used).

Thus the poems to or about Madame Sabatier are supposed to be the cycle of an idealized love: she is his ‘dear Goddess, lucid, pure and wise’ (‘The Spiritual Dawn’). But ‘To One Who Is Too Cheerful’, which was banned by the court, speaks of a desire to creep up while she sleeps and

To bruise your ever-tender breast

And carve in your astonished side

An injury both deep and wide,

To chastize your too-joyous flesh.

And, sweetness that would dizzy me!

In these two lips so red and new

My sister, I have made for you,

To slip my venom, lovingly!

The speaker would punish her self-sufficiency and physical vibrancy by sadistically inventing his own ‘dizzying’ sexual relation to a mutilated body, creating what he imagines as a more exciting simulacrum of a vagina, into which he can infuse the poison of his own nature, making her like him.

The poems linked with Marie Daubrun are especially striking in their combination of attitudes. She is ‘My sister, my child’ whom the famous ‘Invitation to the Voyage’ invites to a land of order and beauty ‘that resembles you’, and also the ‘soft enchantress’ and ‘majestic child’ of ‘The Splendid Ship’, But ‘Poison’ tells us that the poison which flows from her eyes is more powerful than wine or opium.

But all that is not worth the prodigy

Of your saliva, girl,

That bites my soul, and dizzies it, and swirls

It down remorselessly,

Rolling it, fainting, to the underworld!

And ‘To a Madonna’ joins a tradition of poetic celebration, where the poet imagines various aspects of his passion as ornaments for the beloved, with a blasphemous version of allegorical representations of the Virgin, in which the seven deadly sins are seven daggers piercing her heart. In order to complete the role of worshipped Madonna in which he is casting her

Full of a dark, remorseful joy, I’ll take

The seven deadly sins, and of them make

Seven bright Daggers; with a juggler’s lore

Target your love within its deepest core,

And plant them all within your panting Heart,

Within your sobbing Heart, your streaming Heart!

The phantasms of this remorseful joy take us beyond relations to any woman in particular to a claim about the imbrication of sadism, passion, and veneration.

The longest cycle, Jeanne Duval’s, contains a remarkable variety of tones and utterance. The speaker vituperates:

You’d entertain the universe in bed,

Foul woman …

(‘You’d entertain the universe …’)

He fondly mocks:

Your childlike head lolls with the weight

Of all your idleness,

And sways with all the slackness of

A baby elephant’s.

(‘The Dancing Serpent’)

He surrenders:

I cry in every fibre of my flesh:

‘O my Beelzebub, I worship you!’

(‘The Possessed’)

He supplicates:

I beg your pity, you, my only love.

(‘De profundis clamavi’)

He tenderly remembers:

Evenings …

We often told ourselves imperishable things.

                                  . . . . .

In my fraternal hands, your feet would go to sleep.

(‘The Balcony’)

He summons a fusion of love and oblivion:

I want to sleep! to sleep and not to live!

And in a sleep as sweet as death, to dream

Of spreading out my kisses without shame

On your smooth body, bright with copper sheen.

(‘Lethe’)

Or he performs speech acts yet unnamed, as when a declaration of love (‘I love you as I love the night’s high vault, | O silent one’) turns into utterance that resists interpretation as communication to the beloved:

I climb to the assault, attack the source,

A choir of wormlets pressing towards a corpse,

And cherish your unbending cruelty,

This iciness so beautiful to me.

(‘I love you as I love …’)

The self-reflective irony in such strange modes of address (comparing yourself in lovemaking to a choir of wormlets!) places the utterance of poems such as this in a world of poetic action, where the workings of fantasy in the confection of a passionate self can be tested.

Baudelaire’s poems of love are exciting for the particular combinations of attitudes they achieve, for the rhetorical daring that weaves declamatory moments with soothing rhythms or sardonic anti-climaxes, for the surprising images—like the ‘choir of wormlets’ above—which seem very far from empirical situations and for that very reason suggest deeper insights into the mechanisms of desire and the intense farces and tragedies of its realization. Baudelaire’s is a poetry of the body, but while most love poetry identifies the woman with her body, the object of the male gaze, Baudelaire’s is more explicit than most in its engagement with the body as site of phantasms, stimulus to imagination and reverie, and prompter of memory. The woman herself, we might say, is left aside as the gestures and textures of bodies, conceived as if in memory, produce dramas or exchanges, direct fantasies, prompt utterance and reflection. This poetry suggests that imagination never works harder than when love is ‘physical’; conversely, it displays the sadism and physicality of the most spiritual love.

What is missing from Baudelaire’s love poetry is the note of satisfied mutuality that we occasionally find elsewhere. The idea of concord, he suggests, is a delusion: when making love ‘the man sighs, “O my angel!” The woman cries, “Mama!” And these two imbeciles are persuaded that they are thinking as one’ (Intimate Journals). Even in moments of contentment, as when the speaker imagines sleeping in the shade of a young giantess, there is no satisfied mutuality or reciprocity. Is this part of Baudelaire’s modernity, or is it, rather, a subversion of our dearest ‘modern’ belief, that we can find love?

III

Until now this discussion has not mentioned what is usually emphasized in discussions of Baudelaire, his modernity. What is it that leads poets and critics to speak of Baudelaire as the founder of modern poetry? We could certainly say that Baudelaire, in his social existence—fleeing creditors, hanging out with prostitutes, living in cheap hotel rooms, struggling to sell articles to journals—helped contribute to a shift in the idea of the poet: the modern poet is not a seer or public spokesman, like Victor Hugo, Wordsworth, or Pope, but a social misfit, a poète maudit, cursed and ostracized because of his commitment to poetry. But there were many other poets living on the fringes of a hostile society, so this does little to explain Baudelaire’s significance. Paul Verlaine, one of the first to declare Baudelaire’s overwhelming importance, claimed that ‘the profound originality of Charles Baudelaire is to represent powerfully and essentially modern man’—’modern man, made what he is by the refinements of excessive civilization, modern man with his sharpened and vibrant senses, his painfully subtle mind, his brain saturated with tobacco, and his blood poisoned by alcohol’. And T. S. Eliot writes, ‘Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language, for his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced. But his renovation of an attitude towards life is no less radical and no less important.’ Baudelaire is seen not only as the creator of a new sort of poetry but as instigator of something like modern experience, an experience of life that we regard as modern. Clearly there is more to this than alcohol, tobacco, and nervousness, and one wants to know what it is about The Flowers of Evil, given its conservatism in matters of poetic form, that makes it seem to explore the possibility of a distinctly modern experience.

A first answer is this poetry’s ability to bring into verse the banal, the prosaic, or the disgusting—thought to loom especially large in modern life—and give it a poetic function. Praising the power of the beloved’s saliva as well as her eyes (‘Poison’), comparing the sky to the lid of a pot (‘Spleen (IV)’), or suggesting that we become attached to feeling remorse, ‘as beggars take to nourishing their lice’ (‘To the Reader’), Baudelaire produces dissonant combinations, which can be seen as reflecting the dissociated character of modern experience, where consciousness is confronted by objects, sensations, and experiences that do not go together. Dissonant images may also be seen, though, as models for combining or synthesizing disparate sensations, offering moderns a way of appreciating and thus dealing with inchoate experience, encouraging a poetic attitude to the alienation said to characterize modern life. The very title, The Flowers of Evil, underlines an aesthetic of bizarre combinations.