Nation
Baudelaire revoiced...Howard's achievement is such that we can be confident that his Flowers of Evil will long stand as definitive, a superb guide to France's greatest poet.
New Republic
[An] intelligent responsiveness to the poem's meaning informs almost every translation in this volume.
Boston Globe
Not until now has there been an edition of the entire work which successfully captures the distinctive voice of Baudelaire...The level of success among 151 lyrics is so high as to guarantee that Richard Howard's will be the definitive translation in the foreseeable future.
New York Times Book Review
Readers of English do not have to take Baudelaire on faith any longer. For the first time he is present among us, vivid and surprisingly intact, in these fine translations.
Washington Post Book World
Richard Howard, generally esteemed as the finest American translator from the French of the postwar era, offers a new version of this masterpiece...It is indubitably the English edition to acquire.
New York Review of Books
A deft and patient new translation of Les Fleurs Du Mal...Howard, it seems to me, has done what he has set out to, has given us, in English and in verse, a Baudelaire both immediately recognizable and impressively varied...It is a considerable achievement.
From the Publisher
Review - French Peu de recueils poetiques auront fait autant de tapage que Les Fleurs du Mal. Livre de tous les scandales, juge erotique et provocateur, il vaut a son auteur une condamnation pour outrage aux bonnes moeurs des sa parution. Mais il devient dans un meme temps le chef-d'oeuvre magistral de Baudelaire, tenor d'une poesie moderne, empreinte de melancolie et d'exotisme, dans une epoque dechue . En plus de l'edition definitive etablie par le poete en 1861, et augmentee d'un riche apparat critique, cette edition dirigee par Antoine Adam propose de restituer au lecteur contemporain les poemes censures par le tribunal ainsi que les morceaux poetiques ulterieurs, publies sous le titre de Nouvelles Fleurs du Mal.