The Flowers of Evil and Other Poems: Wood Engravings by Émile Bernard

The aim of this book is twofold. It seeks not only to convey in another language the sense, tone, rhyme and rhythm of Baudelaire's original poems, but also to show how the written word can be enhanced through the medium of fine art. Émile Bernard's woodcuts, commissioned by the Parisian publisher Ambroise Vollard for a de luxe edition of 1916, represent the most complete visual interpretation of the poems from among the considerable number of illustrated editions of Les Fleurs du mal that were published during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.