from the recently published Volume 4 of
*Walter Benjamin's Selected Papers*
(Harvard UP)

"The elaborate theorems with which the
principle of "art for art's sake" was
enunciated- not only by its original
proponents but above all by literary
history (not to mention its present
devotees)- ultimately came down to
a specific thesis: that sensibility is the
true subject of poetry. Sensibility, by
its nature, is involved in suffering. If
it experiences its hightest concretization,
its richest determination, in the sphere
of the erotic, then it must find its
absolute consummation, which coincides
with its transfiguration, in the Passion. The
poetics of *l'art pour l'art* issued directly
in the poetic Passion of *Les Fleurs du mal*."
*
"Flowers adorn the individual stations of the
Calvary. They are flowers of evil."
....

"The description of confusion
is not the same as a confused
description."