He said his mother would be “terrified” and “full of blasphemies” at the birth and raising of his son the poet. Without anyone else to blame, she’d have to go to God and “clench her fist.” Without God, she’d have to blame herself. So it goes with Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Benediction,” which appears early on in his book Les Fleurs du Mal or The Flowers of Evil. This is not my favorite poem by Baudelaire but it is the one I am often brought to if I’m going to write anything about the author whom I most love. He is the treasure to me of all treasures, though more like a barrel of vipers than a treasure as he would appreciate. Before I met Baudelaire I was smitten by the angelic loveliness of poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose story of youthful debauchery and sinful mystery most likened to a rock star had me and many others of many generations captivated. Or Verlaine, a lover and friend of Rimbaud, another poet, whose equal boyish lithesome fragility could be compared to a summer song. They were all contemporaries of one another in mid-19th century France. But Baudelaire wrote of a venal dissipation like no other, even Rimbaud, and wrote affectionately and with dispossession and impersonality and with keen professionalism and skill. To have housed the malevolent rot of 19th-century Parisian whores, criminals, and drug addicts so playfully and ornately in the sonnet form and with rhyme—though not always passed into English translations—is brilliance of the highest order. He is the father of disgust and filth in a way that is kingly. He is knighted as a poet of pestilence. I commend him to this day, some thirty-odd years after I first laid eyes on a hard copy of Les Fleurs du Mal his famous and most renowned book of poems. I remember even the cover to this day of the purple and white flower and green-black front, the English-French translation by Richard Howard. It was divinely inspired, even if about the end of mankind in a pool of disease in the gutter. I am brought to this place of remembering him possibly from being in New York City from time to time these days and witnessing the same sort of degradation. Or maybe it is time for me to crawl back into the works of a poet who made no sense of man’s own personal quest for immolation but only was accurate at naming it and putting it into a respectable form as a poem would be.
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