Perfume and rot, silk and carrion, cathedral spires and gutter pools: these poems map the modern city as a landscape of the soul, finding in Parisian streets a beauty so entangled with corruption that neither can be extracted from the other. Published in 1857, the collection was prosecuted for offenses against public morality, six poems condemned, as though the court sensed that what was on trial was the entire Romantic inheritance. Baudelaire took that inheritance and dragged it through the gaslit dark, transforming lyric poetry into something that could hold boredom, lust, self-loathing, and spiritual hunger in a single alexandrine. Every poet who came after walked through a door he opened, into air that smelled of flowers and of graves.