A representative selection of poetry from the groundbreaking author of The Flowers of Evil, translated by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Howard.

Modern poetry begins with Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), who employed his unequalled technical mastery to create the shadowy, desperately dramatic urban landscape—populated by the addicted and the damned—which so compellingly mirrors our modern condition. Deeply though darkly spiritual, titanic in the changes he wrought to the literary world, Baudelaire looms over all the poetic work, great and small, created in his wake.