Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)
The book that launched modern poetry. Baudelaire found beauty in ugliness, sanctity in depravity, the sacred in the city's sordid streets. His "correspondances" (the idea that all the senses speak to each other and point toward a hidden unity) gave Symbolism its program. His treatment of spleen, ennui, and the erotic as serious poetic subjects opened the door for Rimbaud, Verlaine, and everything that followed.
Baudelaire in translation is a real problem: the alexandrines and rhymes that hold the perversity in classical balance vanish, leaving prose summaries of shock that no longer shocks. And the attitude has aged. Women appear as corpses, vampires, and idols, rarely as people, and the satanic posturing can read like a brilliant teenager's notebook.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
