The Flowers of Evil

Collection of poems important in the symbolist and modernist movements, dealing with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. The poems were written in the 1840s and 1850s and first printed in 1857. The collection was reprinted in 1861 with the thirty-five additional poems and the new “Tableaux parisiens” section. In 1866 the collection “Les Épaves” was published in Brussels that included the six poems censored from the first edition of “Les Fleurs du mal”, which were illegal to publish in France until the 1940s. The 1868 edition of “Les Fleurs du mal”, with four additional poems (three original and a fragment of Longfellow that Baudelaire had been paid to translate) was prepared after Baudelaire’s death. See also fleursdumal.org, a site dedicated to “Les Fleurs du mal”.