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 with a 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. 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'.