Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal marks the intrusion of modernity into the French poetic tradition. The carefully ordered collection (here presented in its 1861 edition) betrays a frighteningly honest poet grappling witha sense of his own deep spiritual imperfection, a recognition too of his creative difficulty and an ambivalent teetering on the boundary between the radical and the conservative. As no other poet had done before (and only a few have managed since), Baudelaire sustains in a single collection an exploration of sin, suffering, love, sexual desire, memory, beauty, the city, and the fundamental human impulse towards the new and the unknown - and all this in verse that resonates with a fresh timbre and persuades through its mysterious ‘rhetorique profonde’. This critical edition urges the reader to join the poet in his journey from benediction to death, to become a fellow traveller along the route towards ‘le nouveau’.