John E. Jackson

"Religion in the Fleurs du Mal, is not singular. It certainly exists, but only in a form that is multiple, varied and sometimes contradictory. In its religious attitudes the poetry of Baudelaire hesitates between contradictory postulations: a painful acceptance of suffering understood as an identification with the redemptive suffering of Christ contrasts with the corruption or parody of religious language, and the poems of the ""Révolte"" section which work to substitite the figure of Satan ...