However, Brooks herself maintained that that interpretation was erroneous. One of Gwendolyn Brooks’s most famous poems, “ We Real Cool,” was banned in schools in Mississippi and West Virginia in the 1970s for the penultimate sentence in the poem: “We / Jazz June.” The school districts banned the poem for the supposed sexual connotations of the word “jazz.” The official ban on the poems was not revoked until 1949. In 1861, a second, enlarged edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published, but the six banned poems would not be republished again until Baudelaire's 1866 collection Les Épaves, published in Belgium. The court banned six of the erotic poems: “Lesbos,” “Femmes damnés,” Le Léthé,” “À celle qui est trop gaie,” “Les Bijoux,” and “Les Métamorphoses du Vampire.” The offensiveness of the texts, the court held, lay not only in their context, but also in their “realism.” According to the judges, the poems “necessarily lead to the excitement of the senses by a crude realism offensive to public decency.”īaudelaire was charged with a fine of 300 (later reduced to 50) francs, and Les Fleurs du mal suffered from the controversy, becoming known only as a depraved, pornographic work. On August 20, 1857, French lawyer Ernest Pinard, who had also famously prosecuted French author Gustave Flaubert, prosecuted Baudelaire for the collection. Les Fleurs du mal ( The Flowers of Evil), Charles BaudelaireĪs soon as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal was published in June of 1857, thirteen of its 100 poems were arraigned for inappropriate content. Find out more about these books and others during Banned Books Week, September 18 to September 24, 2022. Here we take a look at fifteen significant poems, poetry collections, and poets that have been censored and banned throughout history. The stories of banned literature do not just belong in the history books even today, some of the most influential texts in our bookstores and libraries are currently being challenged or have been challenged at some point before. For as long as there have been writers, there have been texts that have been challenged, censored, burned, and banned.

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