Only a year after Gustave Flaubert had endured his own public trial for published indecency (for Madame Bovary), a French court declared Les Fleurs du mal an offense against public morals and six poems within it were immediately suppressed (a ruling that would not be reversed until 1949, nearly a century after Baudelaire’s untimely death).
A homeric parallel to this section of the Odyssey can be found in episode five of James Joyce’s Ulysses as well.Įthan Shea is a second-year graduate student in the English Department and Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.Known to his contemporaries primarily as an art critic, but ambitious to secure a more lasting literary legacy, Parisian bohemian Charles Baudelaire, spent much of the 1840s composing gritty, often perverse, poems that expressed his disgust with the banality of modern city life.įirst published in 1857, the book that collected these poems together, Les Fleurs du mal, was an instant sensation-earning Baudelaire plaudits and, simultaneously, disrepute. Those who eat the lotus crave nothing more than to relax on the island, delaying their return home. Book Nine describes Odysseus and his crew landing on the island of the Lotus Eaters, who live lackadaisically eating the fruit of lotus flowers. Lastly, Homer’s epic Odyssey has a section based on flowers. Some poetic works worth checking out that concern flowers are “The Breath of a Rose” by Langston Hughes, “Roses Only” from Marianne Moore’s poetry book Observations, and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, which translates to The Flowers of Evil.
One passage reads: “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, / Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, / With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.” The magic in this play repeatedly appears alongside the budding natural world. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, floral imagery is found throughout the play.
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