Publisher's Synopsis
As we celebrate the bicentenary of his birth, Charles Baudelaire's poetry continues to fascinate readers not just in his native France but throughout the world. The Flowers of Evil is now considered to be a major work of modern poetry, breaking with a romanticism which, for half a century, had praised nature to the point of trivializing it. Baudelaire's vision aspired to an ideal world, the path to which is paved with suffering and misfortune, a vision that exercised a considerable influence on later poets such as Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé.
