«The greatest example of modern poetry in all languages» (T. S. Eliot), «the last lyrical work that had a European impact» (Walter Benjamin), they said about the Flowers. Replacing nature with the city, morality and ideals with the imposing form of Evil, Baudelaire reverses urban values: poet and book become a threat. The «Dante of our fallen age», this last classic and first modernist, writes his lyrical epic with heroes who are prostitutes, beggars, ragpickers, morbidly in love, death-loving, opium addicts. Characters of prohibitions and extremes, excluded from the social fabric, yet an integral part of it, traverse the gas-lit semi-darkness of Paris, love in perfumed rooms, are sick with nostalgia. The sensual, passionate woman of every age is the main heroine of this limbo. However, this unprecedented and bizarre nocturnal spectacle was emphasized with the strictest metrical rules, expressed in the verse forms of classicism. By blending the ancient with the modern, the fleeting with the eternal, the trivial with the priceless, Baudelaire redefined lyricism, making modernity a key component of the new aesthetic, thus nurturing symbolism, but primarily modern (European) poetry: Mallarmé and Rimbaud.