Baudelaire's works were rooted in his Catholic background and his conception of humanity doomed by original sin, yet without salvation. His poetry is an elegiac expression of spiritual despair, a vision in which "evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate, [while] good is always the product of an art." Love particularly, in Baudelaire's poetry, is depicted as dark and purely sensuous; in "The Journey," man is "a gluttonous, lewd tyrant," a "slave of a slave," while his imagery of women is often carnal and cruel.
