The Flowers of Evil
SynopsisPlot
Les Fleurs du mal includes nearly all of Baudelaire's poetry, written from 1840 until his death in August 1867. First published in 1857, it was important in the symbolist —including painting— and modernist movements.
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About this book
Les Fleurs du mal, published in 1857, collects nearly all of the poetry Charles Baudelaire wrote between 1840 and his death in 1867. The French title translates to The Flowers of Evil, and the collection is organized into several themed sections that move through subjects such as beauty, urban life, wine, revolt, and death. Baudelaire wrote mostly in Paris, and the city appears throughout the poems as a place of crowds, loneliness, and sharp contrasts between pleasure and suffering.
The poems address decay, desire, boredom, and the search for sensation in ways that were provocative in mid-nineteenth-century France. Shortly after publication, Baudelaire and his publisher were prosecuted for offending public morality, and six poems were removed from the French edition by court order. A second edition appeared in 1861 with new poems added but the banned pieces still excluded.
The collection became a significant reference point for the symbolist movement in poetry and visual art, and later for modernist writers in several languages. Baudelaire's attention to sound, image, and the uncomfortable edges of city life gave later poets a working example of how verse could hold contradiction without resolving it.
