I've just discovered Dead Can Dance ((For real this time, i.e. not just having seen them live at Primavera Sound once.)) through their album named "Spleen and Ideal".

When I checked it out, I thought: hang on a minute. Haven't I heard that title before?

Sure enough, it's the name of a poetry collection that Charles Baudelaire wrote.

But what's the meaning of spleen? Sure, the medical definition is the bomb, but that's not the same as for our fucked-up lovable poets of yore.

From some sources around the 'net, first on what I think is Baudelaire's finest poetry:

Despite the speaker's preliminary evocation of an ideal world, The Flowers of Evil's inevitable focus is the speaker's "spleen," a symbol of fear, agony, melancholy, moral degradation, destruction of the spirit--everything that is wrong with the world. (The spleen, an organ that removes disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was traditionally associated with malaise; "spleen" is a synonym for "ill-temper.")

The title of the work refers not to the abdominal organ (the spleen) but rather to the second, more literary meaning of the word, "melancholy with no apparent cause, characterised by a disgust with everything".

Also:

In French, "splénétique" refers to a state of pensive sadness or melancholy. It has been popularized by the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) but was already used before in particular to the Romantic literature (19th century). The connection between spleen (the organ) and melancholy (the temperament) comes from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks. One of the humours (body fluid) was the black bile, secreted by the spleen organ and associated with melancholy. In contrast, the Talmud (tractate Berachoth 61b) refers to the spleen as the organ of laughter while possibly suggesting a link with the humoral view of the organ. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, women in bad humor were said to be afflicted by the spleen, or the vapours of the spleen. In modern English, "to vent one's spleen" means to vent one's anger, e.g. by shouting, and can be applied to both males and females. Similarly, the English term "splenetic" is used to describe a person in a foul mood.

Woo.