This bold new translation with facing French text restores once banned poems to their original places and reveals the full richness and variety of the collection.
Poetry has never been very much "my thing", and The Flowers of Evil just aren't interesting or clever enough to catch my attention. For my dirty modern mind his poems just aren't shocking or indecent at all, and most of his ideas fell flat for me. I can imagine the poems were a huge inspiration for his contemporaries, but they don't hold up well over time.
