Flowers of Evil

Charles Baudelaire

may 2024 · New York Review of Books

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Inspired, seminal translations of one of the greatest poets of all time by Edna St. Vincent Millay and George Dillon, now available in a sleek new edition.

Charles Baudelaire invented modern poetry, and Flowers of Evil has been a bible for poets from Arthur Rimbaud to T. S. Eliot to Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, with George Dillon, composed an inspired rhymed version of the book published in 1936 and reprinted here, with the French originals, for the first time in many years.

Millay and Dillon, while respectful of the spirit of the originals, lay claim to them as to a rightful inheritance, setting Baudelaire’s flowing lines to the music of English. The result is one of the most persuasive renditions of the French poet’s opulence, his tortured consciousness, and his troubling sensuality, as well as an impressive reimagining of his rhymes and rhythms on a par with Marianne Moore’s La Fontaine or Richard Wilbur’s Molière.

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Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was born in Paris. His father died when he was five years old, and his mother quickly remarried Jacques Aupick—a military man who later became an ambassador and the bane of his stepson’s existence. After studying law at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Baudelaire devoted himself to art, clothes, and the demimonde, contracting enough debt that Aupick arranged for him to go to India and become a businessman. Baudelaire allowed himself to be conveyed as far as the Île de Bourbon before arranging a return to Paris in 1842. By that time, he had already begun writing the poems that would become Les Fleurs du Mal, which appeared in 1857, provoking scandal and censorship and fundamentally altering the language of French poetry. With his verse, his prose poems, his art criticism, and his translations of Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire was one of the major writers of the nineteenth century.

George Dillon (1906–1968), born in Jacksonville, Florida, was raised in Kentucky, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. At a poetry reading he attended while a student at the University of Chicago, he met Edna St. Vincent Millay; the two soon became lovers and collaborators. His book The Flowering Stone (a series of poems revolving around their relationship) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. He was the editor of Poetry magazine from 1937 to 1949, simultaneously serving in the  US Army Signal Corps during World War II. In addition to his collaboration with Millay on Flowers of Evil, he translated three plays by Racine.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was born in Rockland, Maine, and spent much of her childhood moving from town to town with her two sisters and their single mother, a woman devoted to music and literature. “Vincent,” as Millay called herself, won early fame as a gifted poet and outspoken feminist, and in 1923 she became the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Among her collections are Second April, Fatal Interview (a sonnet sequence in part about her affair with George Dillon), and The Buck in the Snow. After being severely injured in a car accident in 1936, she was more and more confined to her home in Austerlitz, New York, where she lived with her husband, Eugen Jan Boissevain, until his death in 1949.