Author of The Flowers of Evil, precursor of modernist poetry
A French poet, one of the founders of modern poetry. His collection The Flowers of Evil, reversing poetry’s tradition of praising the beautiful and good, mined poetry instead from the ugliness, degradation, melancholy, and death of the city, and on publication was prosecuted as an offense to public morals. He was the first to write the alienation and decadence of the modern metropolis into verse, and proposed a symbolic world of "correspondences," deeply shaping the Symbolism and the whole of modernist literature that followed.
The very title The Flowers of Evil is a provocation: Baudelaire would grow flowers in rot, melancholy, and sin. He held that the degradation and sickness of the modern city hid a profound beauty and truth. This courage to turn his gaze on the dark side opened for poetry a whole territory earlier poets had not dared enter.
On publication in 1857, The Flowers of Evil was prosecuted as an offense to public morals and several poems were banned; this site states the fact.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.