The first city was founded by the first murderer in the biblical story, which tells us something deep about urban dwellings. Jam a crowd of people inside city walls, and what did anyone expect would be the result? Disease, depravity, crime, and the madness of the mob. In the Bible‘s first books, Sodom and Gomorrah are the model cities.
But then, about midway through the Old Testament, David brings the Ark of the Covenant out of the country camp of Shiloh and into Jerusalem — and suddenly, we get the likes of Isaiah saying the city “shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.” God’s holy city is aimed at being a light unto the world, a beacon on a hill, a joyous place of righteousness. And that, too, tells us something deep about urban life. In the arc from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is the only ancient account of archetypal history that begins in a garden and ends in a city.
Apart from their religious valence, we study the old stories because of what they tell us about the truest and most profound parts of human existence and its relation to the world. And what we learn about the city is its dual truth. If you don’t hate urban dwellings, mewing us up in the city’s stink, you aren’t paying attention. And if you don’t love a life thick with strangers — the human comedy, the rush of history — you’ve turned against humanity. You can’t be a grown-up, and you can’t be wise unless you hold this contradictory hate and love.
More particularly, you can’t understand what makes Charles Baudelaire a great poet as he digs into the deep stuff of modern life. “Race of Abel, your carrion / Will fat the steaming soil,” Baudelaire writes in an 1857 poem, which was recently translated by Nathan Brown. “Race of Cain, ascend to heaven, / And cast God down to earth!” This is Baudelaire proclaiming his membership in the devil’s party, of course. There’s a reason he titled his major collection of poetry The Flowers of Evil. But when he takes the pose of the poète maudit — the accursed poet screaming imprecations against the heavens — he is always spiritual, with the dedication of a saint. Born in 1821 and dying too young in 1867, Baudelaire is our most religious 19th-century poet. It’s just that his poetry does religion in the mode of anti-religion.
Brown, the translator of Baudelaire’s French, is an English professor at Concordia University in Montreal and the author of such critical studies as Baudelaire’s Shadow. His translation is not perfect, but that’s mostly because there is no perfect translation of Les Fleurs du mal — if what we need is something as accurate as a prose trot while recreating the poems’ rhyme schemes and, in English, the inspiration of Baudelaire’s original. In the end, Brown chose to err, if it was an error, on the side of exactness. The result is not inspired, but it is serviceable, and that may be what we most need. The fact that Brown’s Flowers of Evil is a bilingual edition — the French and English printed on opposite pages — makes it fit for its purpose.
Brown especially lets us see Baudelaire as the great poet of the city. Paris was more than a backdrop for the man. It was an organism that pulsed with life in all its forms: joyous, corrupt, crowded, and lonely. What he saw most of all — as Haussmann remodeled Paris under the rule of Napoleon III — was how the modern city and the landscape of human architecture are lasting and short-lived beauties.
In his 1863 essay, The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire exalts (and yet despises) the figure of the flâneur — the wanderer who observes the city uninvolved. And in Flowers of Evil, he often adopts the abstract perspective of that flâneur, roaming Paris and yet remaining an outsider. In the poem “A Passer-by,” he spots a woman in the crowd, the sight of her quickly lost in the bustle of the city: “Fugitive beauty / In whose gaze I am suddenly reborn, / Shall I see you no more till eternity? … / O you whom I could have loved.”
The city comes to full expression in what is, I think, the central poem of the book, “The Swan” (“Le Cygne”): “The Paris of old is no more (the form of a city / Changes more swiftly, alas! than a mortal heart).” He sees “starving orphans parched as flowers.” He seeks the “camp of stalls,” and he remembers watching an escaped swan wandering the streets, desperate for water and screeching to the sky for rain. “I see this malcontent, myth strange and fatal … / As if addressing reproaches to God.”
Baudelaire’s city is populated by bustling housewives, cold-eyed prostitutes, rich men in fur coats, and rag-wrapped beggars: “These disjointed monsters who were once women.” They are tragic — all of them, rich and poor, joined in the damage the city does to them. And at the same time, they are alive — all of them woven into the bright urban fabric. The color of the city and the play of light and dark among the city’s buildings always catches his eye. “Here is the charming evening, friend of the criminal,” he writes in “Evening Twilight,” “the sky / Closes slowly … / And impatient man becomes a wild beast.”
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What Baudelaire knows is what we must all know, and he gives us our first and still most profound sense of the modern city: Paris as a paradox of beauty and degradation. Our experience of fleeting and ephemeral moments defines urban life for us, from the romance of chance encounters to the constant melancholy of loss — the haunting of the past in the domain of progress.
This is the city as it actually is, as it must be understood if we are honest: a place founded on murder, foul, and soul-crushing, but at the same time, a place of grace and wonder that is more alive than anything else in human experience.
Joseph Bottum is a writer in the Black Hills and co-founder of the daily poetry Substack newsletter, Poems Ancient and Modern.