"It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton"
About this Quote
Baudelaire isn’t praising the devil so much as taking a scalpel to bourgeois taste. By calling Milton’s Satan “the most perfect type of masculine beauty,” he turns moral panic into an aesthetic category: beauty as intensity, charisma, and proud self-possession rather than virtue. The provocation works because it’s technically defensible. In Paradise Lost, Satan is built like a tragic hero, all grand rhetoric and wounded magnificence; Milton can preach obedience while still granting his rebel the most memorable lines. Baudelaire latches onto that contradiction and dares you to admit what the poem already knows: our eyes and imaginations drift toward the defiant figure who refuses to be small.
The subtext is a manifesto of modern sensibility. Baudelaire’s Paris is the nineteenth-century capital of respectability, commerce, and domesticated feeling. He answers with dandyism and “spleen” - a cultivated appetite for the forbidden, the nocturnal, the marginal. Satan becomes the patron saint of that posture: not evil as cartoon villainy, but as proud refusal of submission, a beautiful disaster. “Masculine beauty” here isn’t biceps or wholesome heroism; it’s the erotic charge of arrogance, the glamour of rebellion, the romance of the outcast who would rather reign in ruin than fit politely into heaven’s rules.
Context matters: Baudelaire was prosecuted for obscenity, fascinated by vice, and allergic to moralizing art. His line is bait - a litmus test for hypocrisy - and a reminder that literature’s power often comes from the very figures it claims to condemn.
The subtext is a manifesto of modern sensibility. Baudelaire’s Paris is the nineteenth-century capital of respectability, commerce, and domesticated feeling. He answers with dandyism and “spleen” - a cultivated appetite for the forbidden, the nocturnal, the marginal. Satan becomes the patron saint of that posture: not evil as cartoon villainy, but as proud refusal of submission, a beautiful disaster. “Masculine beauty” here isn’t biceps or wholesome heroism; it’s the erotic charge of arrogance, the glamour of rebellion, the romance of the outcast who would rather reign in ruin than fit politely into heaven’s rules.
Context matters: Baudelaire was prosecuted for obscenity, fascinated by vice, and allergic to moralizing art. His line is bait - a litmus test for hypocrisy - and a reminder that literature’s power often comes from the very figures it claims to condemn.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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