Thirdly, modernist literature advocates "taking ugliness as beauty" and describes a large number of ugly things. By comparing beauty with ugliness, it regards "appreciating ugliness" as a means to resist the ugliness of reality. Baudelaire is not a man who succumbs to old customs. He can boldly declare to the world: "Poetry is to distinguish beauty from goodness and find beauty in evil." His creed gathered many supporters, and even later wrote in "Ocean of Poetry-Outline of World Poetry History": "What is more beautiful than something beautiful is the decline of beauty."
Baudelaire described many ugly, obscure and gloomy things in Flowers of Evil. However, Baudelaire didn't just show ugliness to the world, but tried to dig the deep meaning of beauty from ugliness. The image of appreciating ugliness in The Flower of Evil is a unique social aesthetic, and its profound meaning is intended to reveal how poets and writers of the same era can achieve spiritual transcendence of ugliness in their understanding of ugliness. In short, ugliness is beauty.
It should be noted that Baudelaire felt all kinds of disharmonious relations in the real world because of his own experience. Therefore, his Flowers of Evil is more devoted to excavating and displaying the ugliness of social reality. It can be said that the aesthetic image of ugliness is the cruel truth that Baudelaire excavated when he confronted the world in despair. Baudelaire described a dark world full of holes in Flowers of Evil, full of all kinds of horrible images, such as hell, devil, drugs, prostitutes, carrion and so on. These images are horrible, morbid, dark and cold, giving people a sense of nothingness, just like ghosts around people, which can't be captured, but they are everywhere, suppressing people's breathing. For example, the rotting corpse depicts what the poet and lover saw on a beautiful morning-a rotting and smelly corpse lying on the gravel road at the corner of the path. The ugliness of carrion is hard to see, but when Baudelaire stopped at this time, he saw more than that. Everything that exists in the society will be like the human body at the foot, from existence to nothingness, from existence to nothingness, fulfilling the mission of being a "human" under the polishing of reality, and finally becoming a poem written by the poet, which is true and cruel, but also interpreting the beauty and hope he expressed.
Third, the conclusion
The significance and value of western modernist literature have not been lost in the wheel of history with the end of World War I and the easing of contradictions in capitalist society. Through these distorted, ugly, but really sad images, we see beauty from filth and its beautiful appearance from ugly social reality. At the same time, we should also admit that as far as literature itself is concerned, traditional realism fails to give full play to the expressive function of literature itself, and these emerging artistic features make up for these shortcomings.
The Flower of Evil is a flower that reveals "hope" in real "evil", and it is the condensation of Baudelaire's infinite love for truth, goodness and beauty and his endless pursuit of the highest ideal in his dark and degenerate life. He cut open his body, recorded the whole process of his broken and miserable soul pursuing the ideal palace as a poem and presented it to readers. In his world, everything in contradiction becomes harmonious and unified, and there is no sharp opposition, so "smelly corruption is magic;" Humble becomes noble; Contradictory, consistent; Drying and adjusting; Unhappy, finished; Somehow, it has been implemented. "So," Flower of Evil "is not the author's ruthless catharsis, but his conscious, psychological and insightful efforts to show himself. Through Baudelaire's description, we are fortunate to see the unique artistic light of that era and understand the broader and deeper significance beyond the appearance.