Les Fleurs du mal Reading Order

Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire is the most influential poetry collection of the nineteenth century and the founding text of modern lyric poetry — the work that transforms the Romantic tradition's engagement with beauty, suffering, and the ideal into the compressed, symbolic, urban register that defines Symbolism, Decadence, and ultimately the whole tradition of modern poetry. The collection is organized into six sections ('Spleen et Idéal,' 'Tableaux parisiens,' 'Le Vin,' 'Fleurs du mal,' 'Révolte,' 'La Mort') that trace the movement of the poetic self through the experience of beauty (always corrupted by mortality), Paris (the modern city as a source of both horror and sublimity), artificial paradises (wine, opium, hashish), transgression (love, death, revolt), and finally the contemplation of death as the last great voyage. The collection was prosecuted for obscenity in 1857 (six poems were ordered removed), and this prosecution is part of its cultural history: Baudelaire was the first major French poet to face the new market and the new state surveillance of the Second Empire, and Les Fleurs du mal is partly a response to both. The collection's influence on all subsequent poetry in French, English, and beyond is impossible to overstate.