Charles Baudelaire

Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city and its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortality, and the liberation provided by the sensual delights of intoxication, art, and women. Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry—a format which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux, and freedom of his age—and one of the founding texts of literary modernism.

The greatest French poet of the 19th century, Baudelaire was also the first truly modem poet, and his direct and indirect influence on the literature of our time has been immeasurable. Flowers of Evil: A Selection contains 53 poems which the editors feel best represent the total work and which. in their opinion, have been most successfully rendered into English. The French texts as established by Yves Gérard Le Dantec for the Pléiade edition are printed en face. Included are Baudelaire's "Three Drafts of a Preface" and brief notes on the nineteen translators whose work is represented.

Publi le 25 juin 1857, r dit dans des versions diff rentes en 1861, 1866 puis 1868, ce recueil est l'une des oeuvres majeures de la po sie moderne. Ses quelque 150 pi ces, empreintes d'une nouvelle esth tique o l'art po tique juxtapose une r alit souvent crue - voire triviale - la beaut la plus ineffable, exerceront une influence consid rable sur des po tes ult rieurs aussi minents que Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud et St phane Mallarm .

Un bourgeois: Il viendra un jour radieux qui poss dera le sage, et les propri taires sages . En attendant cette harmonie supr me, il est juste que les propri taires aspirent tre sage; comme dans la science est pas moins que la propri t se trouve la jouissance . Gozar est une science, l'art est infiniment pr cieux. Bourgeois, vous avez cr des collections, des galeries, des mus es . Vous tes les amis naturels des arts, parce que vous tes, l'un riche, les autres sages .