Selected Poems from les Fleurs du Mal

"Charles Baudelaire, born in Paris in 1821, was one of the greatest nineteenth-century French poets, a key figure in European literature and widely hailed as the father of modernism. With Les Fleurs du mal, he brought an intimate and sometimes shocking note into poetry through his preoccupation with sin, sex, Satanism, suffering and subversion. He was an inspired art critic and translator, a forerunner of the symbolists, and a progenitor of the prose poem." -- Back cover.