“Come, oh come voyage in dreams
At the edge of the possible, the edge of the known…”
The Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire’s masterpiece, ushered in a new age of poetry. The poems, on themes of urban melancholy, beauty, death, and the varieties of sexual desire, elicited both admiration and scandalized horror. The first edition, published in 1857, was seized by the French authorities due to “obscene and immoral” passages. The ban on the condemned poems would not be lifted until 1949. The collection went through a second edition during Baudelaire’s lifetime and a third the year after his death, each of which included many new poems.
This edition presents translations of all the poems from the three editions, together with the French originals.