The Flowers of Evil

About this book

Charles Baudelaire's poems move from the poet's spleen, boredom and sense of exile in a fallen world, through love, beauty and sensual pleasure, to the streets of modern Paris, wine, revolt and finally death, which he greets as a last voyage into the unknown. In them perfumes, colours and sounds answer one another, the poet is an albatross mocked on the deck of a ship, and the reader is addressed as 'hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother'.

Context and significance

When the book appeared in 1857, Baudelaire (1821–1867) and his publisher were prosecuted for offending public morals, and six poems were banned. It is now seen as the first great book of modern poetry. This edition is a selection translated by the composer Cyril Scott in 1909. Compare Against the Grain, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which quotes it.

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