SOURCE: "Gautier, Baudelaire, and Huysmans," in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 421-30.

In the following excerpt, Paglia analyzes the role of sexuality in general and women in particular in Les Fleurs du Mal.

Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (1857) is dedicated to his "master," Gautier. Baudelaire translated Poe and hailed him as his second self. Poe's spiritual father was the Coleridge of the mystery poems. Thus Coleridge, coming through Poe to Baudelaire, daemonizes Gautier, with his Byronic breeziness. Baudelaire's new Decadent tone is haughty and hieratic. His poems are ritualistic confrontations with the horror of sex and nature, which he analyzes with Sade's cutting rhetoric. The chthonian is his epic theme.

Baudelaire grants mother nature neither Rousseau's benevolence nor Sade's vitality. Poe's Coleridgean nature is hostile but still sublime, a vast swirling seascape. But Baudelaire is a city poet for whom...