The essay proposes a reading of Baudelaire’s oeuvre by focussing the attention on the terms related to the voyage at sea in order to delineate their modalities, values and meanings. The analysis will include in its corpus the works "Fleurs du Mal", "Les Paradis artificiels" and especially "Le Spleen de Paris".
Jean-Marie Viprey already examined the main themes of the "Fleur du Mal" and designed a kind of ‘cartography’ of the poet’s vocabulary, underlining the dynamism of Baudelaire’s lexicon.
Elettra Bordino Zorzi observed how the nautical terms were associated to the soul, as it happens in "Les Sept Vieillards"’s final strophe, where the reason is unable to steer the ship of the soul, leaving it at the mercy of the waves in the middle of the raging sea.
The essay investigates the vocabulary and the recurrent theme of the sea, which gives rhythm to the oeuvre of Baudelaire.
