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However, I feel it's more satisfactory to read the poems in the language they were written, French is such a beautiful language anyway that I feel these poems only merit being read in it.
You don't even need to translated to get the feeling of how beautiful, or sorrowful, grave, upbeat or humorous each poem is, it's as if despite the language barrier, you know exactly what Baudelaire is saying and how he is saying it.
Baudelaire is possibly the greatest poet of the 1920s and lived a typical artistic 'á rebours' lifestyle that allowed him to write so beautifully.
Look at "Bénediction" which is the first poem in "Les Fleurs du Mal". Baudelaire spurns subjectivity when he draws an analogy between the personae of the poet and Christ: 'Et je me soûlerai de nard, d'encens, de myrrhe, /De génuflexions, de viandes et de vins, /Pour savoir si je puis dans un coeur qui m'admire /Usurper en riant les hommages divins!' and 'Dans le pain et le vin destinés à sa bouche, /Ils mêlent de la cendre avec d'impurs crachat; /Avec hypocrisie ils jettent ce qu'il touche'. The poet associates authorial presence in the text with the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. This ultimate objectivity, however, was dissipated in advance when "Au Lecteur" concluded with the accusation of 'Hypocrite lecteur,- mon semblable,- mon frère!'.
The words 'hypocrite' and 'hypocrisie' are, like 'hypostasis' of the Eucharist, rooted in the Greek 'hupókris'. Their presence in "Au Lecteur" and "Bénediction" signifies 'acting' as much as 'pretence'. Baudelaire beckons subsequent poets into following these dual lines of self-erasure and self-composition, lines that T. S. Eliot was to retrace in "The Waste Land", the first section of which concludes with a ventriloquistic shriek of 'You! hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable,- mon frère!'. Accordingly, I recommend this text not only to the general reader of French poetry, but also to the student of comparative literature. Eliot's 1926 Clark Lectures laud Baudelaire as the 'parent' of metaphysical literature in France. The Anglo-American poet employs biblical rhythms to pronounce that 'Baudelaire and D'Aurevilly begat Huysmans', while 'Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier produced Mallarmé, who begat Valéry'. Baudelaire, 'plus certain other influences produced Laforgue and Corbière...and Baudelaire with other influences produced Rimbaud, who produced the contemporary surréalistes'. Eliot might have included his own name for he had tagged himself onto this textual genealogy long before his echo of "Au Lecteur", adopting Baudelaire's images of the Eucharist, foggy cities, cats, and decks of cards. (The Clark Lectures are published in "On the Definition of Metaphysical Poetry" edited and introduced by Ronald Schuchard.)
"Les Fleurs du Mal" possesses an exacerbated sensibility that flourishes into a strange beauty to expose its own corruption and with it the festering nature of the literary text per se. It is a sensibility that establishes Baudelaire as a precursor of poetic form in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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