But it is sometimes easy to forget that during the time that Baudelaire was writing Les Fleurs du Mal, much of Paris was a building site, and, instead of imagining a perfect, complete city, Baudelaire found poetry in the dirt and mud of the city of his day.
The section that follows “Spleen et Idéal,” “Tableaux Parisiens” (Parisian Scenes), contains to my mind the most interesting and extraordinary poems because Baudelaire resolutely refuses to evoke the city of Paris in a romanticized way. He is far more interested in the urban landscape at a time when much of Paris was in a state of transition. We now know the name of Georges-Eugène Haussmann as the person responsible during the middle years of the 19th century for carrying out a massive project of urban renewal, resulting in the beautiful wide boulevards that can be found in the city today. But it is sometimes easy to forget that during the time that Baudelaire was writing Les Fleurs du Mal, much of Paris was a building site, and, instead of imagining a perfect, complete city, Baudelaire found poetry in the dirt and mud of the city of his day. If I were to choose one poem to read from this section, it would be “Le Cygne” (The Swan), in which he describes a swan dragging itself through the dust, a symbol of alienation and exile, of incongruous natural beauty in the middle of urban squalor. The fact that the French for swan, cygne, sounds exactly like the word for a sign, signe, allows us to read this poem as a piece about poetry itself.