The Flowers of Evil: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Flowers of Evil, credited to Charles Baudelaire, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire. (edited by James Huneker.) Read in English by LibriVox Volunteers Charles Baudelaire was a French poet whose work is described as combining an exoticism inherited from the Romantics with the Realism of other French writers of his time. The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal) is a book of lyric poetry and his most famous work. In it he expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrialising Paris caused by Haussmann's renovation of the city during the mid-19th century. He coined the term modernity to designate the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience. Les Fleurs du mal includes nearly all Baudelaire's poetry, written from 1840 until his death in August 1867. First published in 1857, it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. Though it was extremely controversial upon publication, with six of its poems censored due to their immorality, it is now considered a major work of French poetry. The poems in Les Fleurs du mal frequently break with tradition, using suggestive images and unusual forms. They deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism, particularly focusing on suffering and its relationship to original sin, disgust toward evil and oneself, obsession with death, and aspiration toward an ideal world. Les Fleurs du mal had a powerful influence on several notable French poets, including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. These English translations by Frank Pearce Sturm (1879-1942) include a selection from the original French edition. (Summary by Alan Mapstone and wikipedia)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Flowers of Evil
• Author credits: Charles Baudelaire
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 49
• Listed recording duration: 1:51:58

Catalogue topics

• poetry
• French poetry
• prose poetry
• modernity
• lyric poetry
• Paris
• symbolist movement

Opening tracks: first 24 of 49

1. 01 - The Dance of Death — 5:29
2. 02 - The Beacons — 4:00
3. 03 - The Sadness of the Moon — 1:28
4. 04 - Exotic Perfume — 1:11
5. 05 - Beauty — 1:16
6. 06 - The Balcony — 2:53
7. 07 - The Sick Muse — 1:33
8. 08 - The Venal Muse — 1:30
9. 09 - The Evil Monk — 1:18
10. 10 - The Temptation — 1:33
11. 11 - The Irreparable — 2:16
12. 12 - A Former Life — 1:08
13. 13 - Don Juan in Hades — 2:03
14. 14 - The Living Flame — 1:20
15. 15 - Correspondences — 1:16
16. 16 - The Flask — 2:17
17. 17 - Reversibility — 1:52
18. 18 - The Eyes of Beauty — 1:18
19. 19 - Sonnet of Autumn — 1:31
20. 20 - The Remorse of the Dead — 1:14
21. 21 - The Ghost — 1:06
22. 22 - To a Madonna — 2:50
23. 23 - The Sky — 1:21
24. 24 - Spleen — 1:33

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.