Les fleurs du mal (New ed)

Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" marks the intrusion of modernity into the French poetic tradition.

The carefully ordered collection (here presented in its 1861 edition) betrays a frighteningly honest poet grappling witha sense of his own deep spiritual imperfection, a recognition too of his creative difficulty and an ambivalent teetering on the boundary between the radical and the conservative.

As no other poet had done before (and only a few have managed since), Baudelaire sustains in a single collection an exploration of sin, suffering, love, sexual desire, memory, beauty, the city, and the fundamental human impulse towards the new and the unknown - and all this in verse that resonates with a fresh timbre and persuades through its mysterious 'rhetorique profonde'.

This critical edition urges the reader to join the poet in his journey from benediction to death, to become a fellow traveller along the route towards 'le nouveau'.