Baudelaire: Selected Poems, ed and translated by Lawrence Lerner, 2003 

Not the most upbeat of poets, Charles Baudelaire was born in 1821 and died at the age of 46.  A relentlessly grim and negative view of life pervades his poems, published under the title of The Flowers of Evil and several poems entitled Spleen.  Viewed by  ‘his disciple’ T.S. Eliot as the forerunner of modernism and the aggressive, defiant rejecter of liberal humanism, Baudelaire writes about death, drunkenness, poverty, sexual deviance, depression, etc.  The first poem in this volume, entitled, To The Reader, begins: “ Stupidity and meanness, error, vice,/Inhabit and obsess us every one./  As for remorse, we find it rather fun:/ We nourish it, as beggars feed their lice.”  Ugh! And yet, Baudelaire is cited by modern poets, artists, and writers as their inspiration, perhaps because he rejects the high flown language and ideals of the Romantics and describes the sad and tragic lot of man as he slowly makes his way from birth to death.  Not for the weak willed!