Flowers of Evil

This is the book that invented modernity. When Charles Baudelaire published these poems in 1857, Paris was being torn apart and rebuilt by Haussmann, its medieval streets replaced by grand boulevards. Baudelaire saw that something vital was being lost in the name of progress, and he captured it: the fleeting, haunted beauty of urban life, the melancholy of the modern condition, the possibility of transcendence even in sin. The poems range through the backstreets and brothels of Paris, through the minds of women who are angels and demons both, through the spleen that drags the soul into the gutter, through the yearning for an ideal just out of reach. Baudelaire's technical brilliance matches his thematic daring, these are classical forms bent to hold content that scandalized his age. Six poems were censored as obscene upon publication. Today that controversy seems almost quaint, but the urgency does not. This is poetry for readers who want to feel alive in a world that is ending and beginning all the time.