“Charles Baudelaire was a true Parisian, a poet of the city, a confimed city-dweller. . . . The New York skyline, with the tremendous Empire State building, with the sequined Chrysler tower silver in the sunlight, with the lights suddenly blazing like yellow sapphires in a million windows, above the outrageous, whirling, dining and conniving town—New York as a spectacle would have delighted him.”

—Edna St. Vincent Millay from her introduction to a translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil), October 19, 1935.