Baudelaires Les Fleurs du mal is in many respects a cyclical work, one that recycles

binaries and the life cycle in ways which confound and breach boundaries between the spiritual
and physical, the imaginary and real, and the contemporary and past. In the most basic sense, it is
a collection with a clear beginning and a clear end, beginning with the birth of a poet (or a poetic
imagination) whose aspiration to strive for unconfined, eternal beauty in a terrestrial, mundane,
debaucherous, and increasingly ephemeral world state is met with disillusionment and ends with
death. One may say that the poetic voice throughout the work descends from Heaven into a
terrestrial purgatory, and finally into a sort of no-man land Baudelairian Hell in which the poet
has no place and whose ideals have been gutted. This regression of the poet accompanies the
progression of the oeuvre and plays itself out many times within sections of the work and within
certain poems themselves.
Given that this pattern has been designated by literary critics for many years, i.e. long
before the invention of computers let alone digital texts and tools designed to analyze them, I
thought the tool Voyant may be able to support (or debunk) such overarching literary claims by
projecting lexicon frequencies throughout the collection in a visual manner. I predicted that
terms such as beauty, sun, happiness, sweetness, youth, etc. would be most frequent at
the beginning of the work, gradually tapering off and eventually becoming rarely used, if at all,
by the end. Conversely, I expected words such as darkness, sadness, pain, hate, death,
and terms religious in nature such as God, Satan, Heaven, and Hell to become more
prevalent as the work comes to its end.
I used the integral text of the 1861 edition for analysis which includes many more poems
than the 1857 edition, including the entire section named Tableaux Parisiens, but is also missing
the six poems that the court found obscene and banned from the 61 publication (a comparison
of the two editions could be interesting). Of course not all of the words fit into as neat a pattern
as I had anticipated and the most frequent words are used more or less consistently in all
sections. That said, below are some results that would seem to validate the idea of a journeyed
cycle as described above. First are the words used most frequently at the beginning of the work,
then those found at the end, with esprit acting as a sort of intermediary.
1) Youth (Jeunesse)


2) Happiness (Bonheur)


3) Beauty (Beaut)




4) Morale/ [spiritual] sense/intellect (esprit)


5) Misery (misre)




6) Death (mort)


7) Oblivion/forgetfulness/forgotten-adj. (oubli/oubli)




8) Pain (douleur)


9) God (Dieu)


10) Satan (Satan)