FOREWORD

  Baudelair is one of that small company of poets who with a single book os short poems have permanently affected the history and nature of poetry. The Flowers of Evil have now passed their first century. They have been translated into all the principal languages of the world.
  From the one hundred and sixty-three poems of the complete bilingual edition (New Directions 1955), we have here chosen fifty-three of the finest translations. Several poems which we should have liked to include, for themselves, have been omitted as less effective in the English version. "The Skeleton Laboror" by Yvor Winters (p.95) did not appear in our former collection.
  Baudelaire over a period of several years made notes and drafts for a preface, which he planned for the second (1861) and again for the third (1868) edition of his poems, but which he left unfinished, probably on the advice of his publisher. These form "Three Drafts of a Preface," which first appeared in English in our edition of 1955; the translation is based on the text given in the critical edition of Les Fleurs du Mal by Jacques Crépet and Georges Blin.
  The texts of the poems are those established by Yves Gérard Le Dantec for the Pléiade edition.



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