Which poet wrote the collection "The Flowers of Evil"?

Charles Baudelaire wrote the poetry collection “The Flowers of Evil,” known in French as Les Fleurs du mal.

First published in 1857, the collection gathered much of Baudelaire’s poetry and became a landmark of nineteenth-century French literature. Its poems repeatedly set beauty against decay, desire against guilt, and the ideal against “spleen,” Baudelaire’s term for oppressive boredom and spiritual discontent. The book’s carefully arranged sections give these themes an overall movement rather than presenting the poems as an unrelated anthology.

The collection caused a major scandal in France. Baudelaire was prosecuted, fined, and ordered to remove six poems judged immoral. Those poems later appeared in the separate volume Les Épaves. A revised edition in 1861 added material, including the section “Parisian Sketches,” while a posthumous 1868 edition expanded the work further.

Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Rimbaud are associated with later developments in French poetry, especially symbolism, but none wrote this collection. Baudelaire’s combination of urban modernity, musical language, and disturbing imagery helped make the book foundational for both Symbolist and modernist writers.