This is the sort of poetry that put me off the subject when I was at school, if you just read the book it is bloody awful, if you take your time and try and figure out what the words mean then you’ll grasp just why everybody says this is so good. It will also help to read this when stuck in a pandemic lockdown, the feeling of melancholia from the book will ring true with you.

I can’t say I particularly enjoyed this collection, I can see that it was ahead of it’s time and it is great that it inspired so many but it strictly sticks within the rules of poetry, each poem sticks with that fancy iambic meter thing used in poetry and the rhyming has to work at the expense of using a sensible word, this dumbass had to keep looking up words…what sort of crazy person would use “laves” instead of wash? Because of sticking within these rules the poems don’t seem to have any character to them, this really shows in the longer poems, I was nearly falling asleep near the end of a few of them. Every now and then though you come across a real gem, a poem that stands out and grabs your attention..one like “The Death Of The Poor”.

Not the easiest collection to read but a million times better than anything I could produce.

Blog review: felcherman.wordpress.com/2021/04/01/flowers-of-evil-les-fleurs-du-mal-by-charles-baudelaire/