The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories and poorhouses. In love poems such as 'Le Beau Navire', flights of lyricism entwine with languorous eroticism, while prose poems such as 'La Chambre Double' deal with the agonies of artistic creation and mortality. With their startling combination of harsh reality and sublime beauty, formal ingenuity and revolutionary poetic language, these poems, including a generous selection from Les Fleurs du Mal, show Baudelaire as one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century.

Les Fleurs du mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857, it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The poems deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

"Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press" Immediately after the publication of "Les Fleurs du Mal" in 1857, Baudelaire was prosecuted and found guilty of obscenity and blasphemy. Today, "Les Fleurs du Mal" is considered by many to be the most important and influential poetry collection published in Europe in the 19th century. For Baudelaire, love was the essence of the forbidden, and he saw the individual as a divided being, drawn equally towards good and evil, the ideal and the sensual. His originality sets him apart from the dominant literary schools of his time and his poetry is regarded as the last brilliant summation of Romanticism, the precursor of Symbolism, and the first expression of Modernity. This volume brings together, for the first time, "Les Fleurs du Mal" and the original etchings by Odilon Redon inspired by the text. These wonderful examples of the work of Odilon Redon, the greatest of the French Symbolists, depict the world of fantasy, which he believed few dared to envision.

On the 200th anniversary of Baudelaire’s birth comes this stunning landmark translation of the book that launched modern poetry. Known to his contemporaries primarily as an art critic, but ambitious to secure a more lasting literary legacy, Charles Baudelaire, a Parisian bohemian, spent much of the 1840s composing gritty, often perverse, poems that expressed his disgust with the banality of modern city life. First published in 1857, the book that collected these poems together, Les Fleurs du mal, was an instant sensation—earning Baudelaire plaudits and, simultaneously, disrepute. Only a year after Gustave Flaubert had endured his own public trial for published indecency (for Madame Bovary), a French court declared Les Fleurs du mal an offense against public morals and six poems within it were immediately suppressed (a ruling that would not be reversed until 1949, nearly a century after Baudelaire’s untimely death). Subsequent editions expanded on the original, including new poems that have since been recognized as Baudelaire’s masterpieces, producing a body of work that stands as the most consequential, controversial, and influential book of poetry from the nineteenth century. Acclaimed translator and poet Aaron Poochigian tackles this revolutionary text with an ear attuned to Baudelaire’s lyrical innovations—rendering them in “an assertive blend of full and slant rhymes and fluent iambs” (A. E. Stallings)—and an intuitive feel for the work’s dark and brooding mood. Poochigian’s version captures the incantatory, almost magical, effect of the original—reanimating for today’s reader Baudelaire’s “unfailing vision” that “trumpeted the space and light of the future” (Patti Smith). An introduction by Dana Gioia offers a probing reassessment of the supreme artistry of Baudelaire’s masterpiece, and an afterword by Daniel Handler explores its continued relevance and appeal. Featuring the poems in English and French, this deluxe dual-language edition allows readers to commune both with the original poems and with these electric, revelatory translations.

Upon its original publication in 1857 Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" or "The Flowers of Evil" was embroiled in controversy. Within a month of its publication the French authorities brought an action against the author and the book's publisher claiming that the work was an insult to public decency. Eventually the French courts would acknowledge the literary merit of Baudelaire's work but ordered that six poems in particular should be banned from subsequent publication. The notoriety caused by this scandal would ultimately work in the author's favor causing the initial publication to sell out, thus prompting the publication of another edition. The second edition was published in 1861, it included an additional thirty-five poems, with the exclusion of the six poems censored by the French government. In this volume we reproduce that 1861 edition along with the six censored poems in an English translation by William Aggeler along with the original French. Rich with symbolism, "The Flowers of Evil" is rightly considered a classic of the modernist literary movement. Its themes of decadence and eroticism seek to exhibit Baudelaire's criticism of the Parisian society of his time. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and includes an introduction by Frank Pearce Sturm.

Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, which in successive editions contained all of his published poems, has opened new vistas for man's imagination and quickened the sensibilities of poets everywhere.

Baudelaire was practically unknown in Spain until the last two decades of the nineteenth century when the first important criticism of his work was published by two famous critics, Juan Valera and Clarín. Valera attacked Les Fleurs du mal on aesthetic grounds, basing his criticism entirely on the "satanic" poems. At the same time, Clarín published a series of articles favorable to Baudelaire. Save for Clarín, Spanish critics in the first two decades of the twentieth century based their opinions of Baudelaire solely on Les Fleurs du mal. A notable exception was an article written around 1910 by Emilia Pardo Bazan based on the full scope of Baudelaire's work. Since the 1920s Spanish critics have come to share the high esteem which Baudelaire continues to receive throughout the world.

Perhaps the most explosively original mind of his century, Charles Baudelaire has proved profoundly influential well beyond the borders of nineteenth-century France. Writers from Lord Alfred Douglas to Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Aldous Huxley to Seamus Heaney, from Arthur Symons to John Ashbery, from Basil Bunting to Robert Lowell, have all attempted to transmit in English his psychological and sexual complexity, his images of urban alienation. This superb addition to the Poets in Translation series brings together the translations of his poetry and prose poems that best reveal the different facets of Baudelaire's personality: the haughtily defiant artist, the tormented bohemian, the savage yet tender lover, and the celebrant of strange and haunted cityscapes.