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:
Never in the space of so few pages have I seen so many breasts bitten, nay even chewed; never did I see such a procession of devils, of foetus, of demons, of cats, and vermin. 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 ... FULL STORY »
