《恶之花》出版于1857年。当时在法国文坛上浪漫主义经历了风靡一时的发展后,已开始转入低潮。浪漫主义的文学家们,纵情地表露了被压抑的思潮和情感之后,都已开始面对现实。那时的封建王朝和新兴的资产**正进行*后的搏斗,整个法国经历着急剧的变化。社会各**都在分崩离析,人们越来越深刻地认识到了封建王朝的腐朽,而日益壮大起来的资本主义又使越来越多的无产者更加贫困化,这一切都深深反映到文学思潮中来,于是以雨果为代表的一批曾是浪漫主义大师的文学家开始转入批判现实主义的创作。拉马丁、缪赛等另一批人却转向了消极浪漫主义一方。轰动一时的浪漫主义文学运动开始消沉瓦解,正在这时《恶之花》以*浪漫派的面目在巴黎出版了。《恶之花》从各个角度来讲都是面目一新独树一帜,出乎人们的意料,顿时引起了社会各界人士的倾注,某些人认为这个怪物般的诗集是伤风败俗和亵渎神明的。波德莱尔因此还吃了一场官司,诗集不仅被禁,而且诗人和出版商都被罚了款。但是伟大的作家雨果先生却对此书大加赞扬,说它犹如光辉夺目的星星,给法国诗坛带来了新的颤栗。雨果的这一论断随着时间的推移越来越显得到正确和公允。正是这部《恶之花》开创了法国近代诗歌的新时代

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A STUDYBy F. P. Sturm Iharles Baudelaire was one of those who take the downward path which leads to salvation. Thereare men born to be the martyrs of the world and of their own time; men whose imagination carries them beyond all that we know or have learned to think of as law and order; who are so intoxicated with a vision of a beauty beyond the world that the world's beauty seems to them but a little paint above the face of the dead; who love God with a so consuming fire that they must praise evil for God's glory, and blaspheme His name that all sects and creeds may be melted away; who see beneath all there is of mortal loveliness, the invisible worm, feeding upon hopes and desires no less than upon the fair and perishable flesh; who are good and evil at the same time; and because the good and evil in their souls finds a so perfect instrument in the refined and tortured body of modern times, desire keener pleasure and more intolerable anguish than the world contains, and become materialists because the tortured heart cries out in denial of the soul that tortures it. Charles Baudelaire was one of these men; his art is the expression of his decadence; a study of his art is the understanding of that complex
movement, that "inquietude of the Veil in the temple," as Mallarmé called it, that has changed the literature of the world; and, especially, made of poetry the subtle and delicate instrument of emotional expression it has become in our own day.We used to hear a deal about Decadence in the arts, and now we hear as much about Symbolism, which is a flower sprung from the old corruption—but Baudelaire is decadence; his art is not a mere literary affectation, a mask of sorrow to be thrown aside when the curtain falls, but the voice of an imagination plunged into the contemplation of all the perverse and fallen loveliness of the world; that finds beauty most beautiful at the moment of its passing away, and regrets its perishing with a so poignant grief that it must needs follow it even into the narrow grave where those "dark comrades the worms, without ears, without eyes," whisper their secrets of terror and tell of yet another pang—
"Pour ce vieux corps sans âme et mort parmi les morts."
All his l ife Baudelaire was a victim to an unutterable weariness, that terrible malady of the soul born out of old times to prey upon civilisations that have reached their zenith—weariness, not of life, but of living, of continuing to labour and suffer in a world that has exhausted all its emotions and has no new thing to offer. Being an artist, therefore, he took his revenge upon life by a glorification of all the sorrowful things that it is life's continual desire to forget. His poems speak sweetly of decay and death, and whisper their graveyard secrets into the ears of beauty. His men are men whom the moon has touched with her own phantasy: who love the immense ungovernable sea, the unformed and multitudinous waters; the place where they are not; the woman they
will never know; and all his women are enigmatic courtesans whose beauty is a transfiguration of sin; who hide the ugliness of the soul beneath the perfection of the body. He loves them and does not love; they are cruel and indolent and full of strange perversions; they are perfumed with exotic perfumes; they sleep to the sound of viols, or fan themselves languidly in the shadow, and only he sees that it is the shadow of death.An art like this, rooted in a so tortured perception of the beauty and ugliness of a world where the spirit is mingled indistinguishably with the flesh, almost inevitably concerns itself with material things, with all the subtle raptures the soul feels, not by abstract contemplation, for that would mean content, but through the gateway of the senses; the lust of the flesh, the delight of the eye. Sound, colour, odour, form: to him these are not the symbols that lead the soul towards the infinite: they are the soul; they are the infinite. He writes, always with a weary and laborious grace, about the abstruser and more enigmatic things of the flesh, colours and odours particularly; but, unlike those later writers who have been called realists, he apprehends, to borrow a phrase from Pater, "all those finer conditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety of operation which constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerve and the keener touch can follow."In one of his sonnets he says:"Je hais la passion et l'esprit me fait mal!"

CONTENTS CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY / 1 POEMS IN PROSE I / 34II/ 36III/ 37IV/ 40V / 42VI/ 43VII/ 45VIII/ 48IX/ 51X / 53XI/ 58XII/ 59 POEMS IN PROSE DEDICATION TO ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE / 63 A JESTER / 65THE DOG AND THE VIAL / 66THE WILD WOMAN AND THE COQUETTE / 67 THE OLD MOUNTEBANK / 70THE CLOCK / 73A HEMISPHERE IN A TRESS / 75 THE PLAYTHING OF THE POOR / 77 THE GIFTS OF THE FAIRIES / 79 SOLITUDE / 82PROJECTS / 84THE LOVELY DOROTHEA / 86 THE COUNTERFEIT MONEY / 88 THE GENEROUS PLAYER / 90THE ROPE TO EDWARD MANET / 94 CALLINGS / 98A THOROUGHBRED / 102 THE MIRROR / 103THE HARBOR / 104 MISTRESSES' PORTRAITS / 105 SOUP AND THE CLOUDS / 110 THE LOSS OF A HALO / 111 MLLE. BISTOURY / 112LET US FLAY THE POOR / 116GOOD DOGS TO MR. JOSEPH STEVENS / 119 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE EVERY MAN HIS CHIMÆRA / 125 VENUS AND THE FOOL / 127 ALREADY! / 129THE DOUBLE CHAMBER / 131AT ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING / 134 THE CONFITEOR OF THE ARTIST / 136 THE THYRSUS TO FRANZ LISZT / 138 THE MARKSMAN / 140THE SHOOTING-RANGE AND THE CEMETERY / 141THE DESIRE TO PAINT / 143 THE GLASS-VENDOR / 145 THE WIDOWS / 148THE TEMPTATIONS; OR, EROS, PLUTUS, AND GLORY / 151 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL THE DANCE OF DEATH / 157 THE BEACONS / 160THE SADNESS OF THE MOON / 162 THE BALCONY / 163THE SICK MUSE / 165 THE VENAL MUSE / 166 THE EVIL MONK / 167 THE TEMPTATION / 168 THE IRRÉPARABLE / 170 A FORMER LIFE / 172DON JUAN IN HADES / 173 THE LIVING FLAME / 174 CORRESPONDENCES / 175 THE FLASK / 176 REVERSIBILITY / 178THE EYES OF BEAUTY / 180 SONNET OF AUTUMN / 181THE REMORSE OF THE DEAD / 182 THE GHOST / 183TO A MADONNA / 184 THE SKY / 186 SPLEEN / 187THE OWLS / 188 BIEN LOIN D'ICI / 189CONTEMPLATION / 190TO A BROWN BEGGAR-MAID / 191 THE SWAN / 194THE SEVEN OLD MEN / 196 THE LITTLE OLD WOMEN / 198 A MADRIGAL OF SORROW / 201 MIST AND RAIN / 203SUNSET / 204THE CORPSE / 205 AN ALLEGORY / 207 THE ACCURSED / 208 LA BEATRICE / 210THE SOUL OF WINE / 212 THE WINE OF LOVERS / 214 THE DEATH OF LOVERS / 215THE DEATH OF THE POOR / 216 GYPSIES TRAVELLING / 217 FRANCISCÆ MEÆ LAUDES / 218 A LANDSCAPE / 220THE VOYAGE / 222 FROM THE FLOWERS OF EVIL BENEDICTION / 231 ILL LUCK / 234 BEAUTY / 235 IDEAL LOVE / 236HYMN TO BEAUTY / 237 EXOTIC FRAGRANCE / 239 XXVIII SONNET / 240 MUSIC / 241THE SPIRITUAL DAWN / 242 THE FLAWED BELL / 243 THREE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE I / 247II/ 249 III/ 251 INTIMATE PAPERS FROM THE UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF BAUDELAIRE ROCKETS MY HEART LAID BARE / 257 INTIMATE PAPERS ROCKETS / 259MY HEART LAID BARE / 274