The Flowers of Evil

A major work of world literature, The Flowers of Evil scandalized Baudelaire’s contemporaries and reinvented beauty in the midst of modernity. Probing the depths of the modern psyche in a voice at once caustic and vulnerable, melancholic and humorous, Baudelaire’s infamous book brings to the surface a new understanding of evil, of eroticism, and of social life through an astonishing variety of poetic forms and styles.

When it was published in 1857, six poems of the volume’s poems were banned on charges of obscenity. Baudelaire then reworked the book into a masterfully expanded version published in 1861. This new translation by acclaimed poetry scholar Nathan Brown includes the banned poems in a facing-page, dual-language edition of the definitive 1861 version, along with a major new introduction to the significance of Baudelaire’s work.

Brown has carefully preserved the lineation, figurative language, punctuation, and grammatical structures of the original, finally giving us a version of The Flowers of Evil suitable for the general reader as well as scholars and teachers working in English. Recognized as the most successful translation of Baudelaire’s major work by eminent poetry critic Marjorie Perloff, this version of Baudelaire sets a new standard for fidelity to the original and sensitivity to the tone of this central work of modern literature.