The Poetry of Villon and Baudelaire: Two Worlds, One Human Condition

The Poetry of Villon and Baudelaire is a comparative reading of Francois Villon’s and Charles Baudelaire’s poetry. Despite the intervening centuries, these works are analogous in a number of ways. More than a collection of verses, the Lais, the Testament, and Les Fleurs du Mal share an overarching design. They evoke a poetic universe where life in the world is opposed to the spiritual and the poetically transcendent. This study elucidates the affinities by examining the poets’ treatment of certain themes: temporality, physical constraint, deterioration, death, putrefaction, and the danse macabre.