This book shocked and shocked its contemporaries with the concentration of evil that its pages exude. Publishers did not publish it, fearing persecution from the church and state. An unknown French poet, hiding under a pseudonym, challenged morality and hypocrisy, singing, perhaps, all the vices known to mankind. Without “Songs” and “Poems” the aesthetics of modernity and postmodernity would be unthinkable. Lautreamont breathed a new spirit into French and world poetry - stench and decay, intoxication with sin and endless despair...Contains obscene language!