The Flowers of Evil: Les Fleurs du mal

The Flowers of Evil - Les Fleurs du mal: Charles Baudelaire and translated into English Verse by Cyril Scott. The Flowers of Evil is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857, it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The poems deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. Baudelaire was a slow and fastidious worker, often sidetracked by indolence, emotional distress and illness, and it was not until 1857 that he published his first and most famous volume of poems, The Flowers of Evil. Some of these poems had already appeared in the Revue des deux mondes in 1855, when they were published by Baudelaire's friend Auguste Poulet Malassis. Some of the poems had also previously appeared as "fugitive verse" in various French magazines during the previous decade.