Synopses & Reviews
In both his life and his poetry, Charles Pierre Baudelaire pushed the accepted limits of his time. His dissolute bohemian life was as shocking to his nineteenth-century readers as his poetry. Writing in classical style but with brutal honesty, Baudelaire laid bare human suffering, aspirations, and perversions.
Synopsis
'I have sought forgetful sleep in love; but love is nothing but a mattress of needles'
The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories and poorhouses. In love poems such as 'Le Beau Navire', flights of lyricism entwine with languorous eroticism, while prose poems such as 'La Chambre Double' deal with the agonies of artistic creation and mortality. With their startling combination of harsh reality and sublime beauty, formal ingenuity and revolutionary poetic language, these poems, including a generous selection from Les Fleurs du Mal, show Baudelaire as one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century.
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Synopsis
The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories and poorhouses. In love poems such as 'Le Beau Navire', flights of lyricism entwine with languorous eroticism, while prose poems such as 'La Chambre Double' deal with the agonies of artistic creation and mortality. With their startling combination of harsh reality and sublime beauty, formal ingenuity and revolutionary poetic language, these poems, including a generous selection from Les Fleurs du Mal, show Baudelaire as one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century.
About the Author
Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. His first publication was
Le Salon de 1845, and he earned renown as an art critic and as a translator of Edgar Allan Poe. As a poet, his fame rests on
Les Fleurs du mal. The collection was published in 1857, and certain poems were condemned as an offence against public morals; the book is now considered one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century French literature. Baudelaire went to Brussels, where he hoped to earn money by lecturing; but his hopes foundered, his health gave way, and he was taken back to Paris, where he died in 1867.
Carol Clark is an emeritus fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. She has previously translated Baudelaire for Penguin Classics.
Carol Clark is an emeritus fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. She has previously translated Baudelaire for Penguin Classics.
Carol Clark is an emeritus fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. She has previously translated Baudelaire for Penguin Classics.
Table of Contents
Selected Poems Introduction
Notes on the Text
Suggestions for Further Reading
Les Fleurs du Mal
Au Lecteur
Spleen et Idéal
Tableaux parisiens
Le Vin
Fleurs du Mal
Révolte
La Mort
Les Epaves
Les Epaves
Galanteries
Pièces diverses
Poems Added in 1868
Other Verse Poems
Petits Poëmes en prose
Glossary
Index of Titles and First Lines