Used book – Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire, Yves Florenne, Yves Bonnefoy

Modern poetry begins with Les Fleurs du Mal: subjective lyricism gives way to the "voluntary impersonality" that Baudelaire himself postulated; nature and its cyclical returns are replaced by urban scenery and its changes marked by history, and sometimes the poet accesses beauty through the experience of ugliness. As for the evil displayed in the collection's title, while it proves to us that art here is detached from morality, it nonetheless preserves the profound spirituality of the poems.

Hence the dismay Baudelaire must have felt when the Tribunal de la Seine condemned the first edition of 1857 for "outrage to public morality and good customs" and forced him to remove six pieces from the volume - thus challenging the structure of the collection which he had so carefully planned. In 1861, the second edition was augmented by thirty-five pieces, and Baudelaire continued to write other poems for his book. But after the censorship, it was death that prevented him from giving Les Fleurs du Mal the definitive form he desired - and which we will never know.