1. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
‘FLEURS DU MAL’
‘Flowers of Evil’

2. His poetry urges his audience to learn from his superior moral insight, while begging for understanding and forgiveness.

3. HIS POETRY
His poetry offers feminists today abundant evidence of male madonna-prostitute complex and of a keen if awareness of his contradictory feelings about women.
Like romantic poetry it expresses intense feelings… but like modernist poetry it is grounded in urban reality.
It is lyric poetry.
His poetry employs traditional seriousness of lyric poetry - repetition of sound and rhythm - today we see this in popular music.

4. Morality and Aesthetics
The prose poems address social and moral awareness using the pronoun ‘we’. This ensures that the readers are aware that they are also depraved and irresponsible.
His writing aims to shock.
There is the occasional motif of the senseless act - an impulsive shocking action.
His poetry vacillates between hysteria and lethargy.

5. ‘The Swan’ Baudelaire moved home more than 56 times…
From his many different abodes he observed all manners of life.
He saw animals rotting in the steers, along with alcoholics, drug addicts, ragpickers loitering in the gutters.

6. Alienation: Baudelaire becomes an alien in his native city when urban renewal replaces the familiar sights and landmarks he knew in earlier times. He is like the swan, which was taken from its native lake; the slave woman, who was taken from her native land; and orphans, who were taken from their parents by death.

7. Despoiled Beauty: Just as the Greeks despoiled Troy and its women, the Parisians of the second half of the nineteenth century despoiled the old Paris—or so Baudelaire says in his poem. He compares the old Paris to the beautiful Andromache, wife of the slain Trojan hero Hector. The Greeks killed her husband and destroyed her city, then one of them carried her off. Baudelaire believes urban renewal is killing the old Paris, mythical and legendary in its own way, just Achilles slew Andromache's husband.

8. Despondency: Andromache, the swan, and the black slave woman all suffer despondency after they lose something precious and sacred. Andromache loses her husband, her city, and her freedom. Likewise, the swan and the slave also lose their freedom, as well as the comfort and security of familiar climes.

9. Defiant Memory: The past remains alive in the memory of Baudelaire and other sensitive souls who refuse to forget. The memory of the old Paris eclipses the experience of the new paris. As the speaker says, "Mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs" (My dear memories are heavier that rocks).