The Flowers of Evil: Including Wreckage (1866) and Miscellaneous Poems

by Charles Baudelaire, John E Tidball (Translation)

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.

270 pages, Paperback

Published May 29, 2021

About the author

Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later symbolist and modernist poets.

Reputation of Charles Pierre Baudelaire rests primarily on perhaps the most important literary art collection, published in Europe in the 19th century. Similarly, his early experiment Petits poèmes en prose (1868) ( Little Prose Poems ) most succeeded and innovated of the time.

From financial disaster to prosecution for blasphemy, drama and strife filled life of known Baudelaire with highly controversial and often dark tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Long after his death, his name represents depravity and vice. He seemingly speaks directly to the 20th century civilization.