Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Remarks on Individual Poets

Baudelaire [2]

Herbert said yesterday that though Baudelaire is a great poet, he is considered an immoral one.

That is not anything against his greatness — only against his morality. Plenty of great people have been “immoral”.

I had just a glance at Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and I found this:

The moon more indolently dreams tonight

Than a fair woman on her couch at rest,

Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,

Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.

What a queer imagination, but vulgar or immoral?

What is there vulgar in it or immoral? It is as an indolent distraught gesture that he puts it. How does it offend against morality?

31 January 1937