"First published in 1958, this collection introduced a corpus of western poetry to countless American students, Francophiles, and would-be poets, among them Patti Smith, whose Introduction to this edition testifies to its impact on her own career. The poetic and cultural tradition forged by the symbolist poets featured herein - Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire, and others - reverberated throughout the avant garde and countercultures of the twentieth century. Surrealism, modernism, abstract impressionism, and the Beat movement all find their roots in the examples of these poets and their theories of art."--Jacket.