: A central thesis is that "the death of Satan was a tragedy for the imagination". Without a personified devil or a divine plan to explain suffering, the human imagination must take on the burden of giving pain a "tenable attitude".
The title is a clear nod to Les Fleurs du Mal ( The Flowers of Evil ). While Baudelaire focused on the allure of vice and the "hellish pleasures" of the city, Stevens adapted these "Baudelairean implications" to a more humanistic, wartime context. Later poets, such as Elizabeth Bishop , also engaged with these themes, using Baudelaire and Stevens as models to explore "aggressive desire" and the "unnatural" act of writing poetry in a violent world. "Merely in living as and where we live": Part I L’esthétique du mal
: Stevens uses this phrase to describe the aspects of evil that speech cannot fully propound or explain. He argues that although we cannot logically solve the problem of evil, the "gaiety of language" and the creation of "sensuous worlds" allow us to live within it. : A central thesis is that "the death