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Episode 56: Dana Gioia on Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil

Sacred and Profane Love

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Do You Believe in Damnation?

Baudelaire is perhaps the first-grade artist who decides, I'm damned. And so my subject will be about the experience of damnation. There's a very great French poet of the late Renaissance named Jacques Guvillon,. We know very little about him, but everything we know about him is awful. He looks at his sins, and then he begins to write really funny poems about being a scoundrel. So it's impossible to understand what Baudelaire was doing without understanding damnation in his own notion ofDamnation.

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