Perspective

How many classics are initially condemned! Quite remarkable.

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com   Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal   On this day in 1857, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal was published. Critics now regard it as one of the most important and influential collection of poetry to come out of the 19th century, and an essential bridge between Romanticism and Modernism, but contemporary newspapers like Figaro would have no part of it: The book is a hospital full of all the insanities of the human mind, of all the putresence of the human heart; if only this were done to cure them it would be permissible, but they are incurable. Baudelaire's poems are notoriously difficult to translate. Norman Shapiro's 1998 edition is highly-praised; among earlier English editions is one co-translated by George Dillon and Edna St. Vincent Millay, a poet almost as notorious as Baudelaire in lifestyle.