frlit1-8, Exercise 1: Baudelaire

Model answer:

Baudelaire is called the first modern poet because his collection Les Fleurs du mal (1857) dealt with beauty and decay, desire and boredom, and the modern city of Paris, and because he described modern life through figures such as the flaneur, the idle stroller who observes the city. In 1857 the poems were prosecuted for offending public morals, in the same year as the trial of Madame Bovary; he was fined and had to remove six poems, and the ban on those poems was formally lifted in the twentieth century.

Check the details against a reference work.