New Releases by Charles Baudelaire

Perhaps the most explosively original mind of his century, Charles Baudelaire has proved profoundly influential well beyond the borders of nineteenth-century France. Writers from Lord Alfred Douglas to Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Aldous Huxley to Seamus Heaney, from Arthur Symons to John Ashbery, from Basil Bunting to Robert Lowell, have all attempted to transmit in English his psychological and sexual complexity, his images of urban alienation. This superb addition to the Poets in Translation series brings together the translations of his poetry and prose poems that best reveal the different facets of Baudelaire''s personality: the haughtily defiant artist, the tormented bohemian, the savage yet tender lover, and the celebrant of strange and haunted cityscapes.

This translation originally published: 2002.

Paris Spleen, a diverse collection of fifty prose poems, is provided here in a clear, engaging, and accurate translation that conveys the lyricism and nuance of the original French text. Also included is a translation of Baudelaire''s early novella, La Fanfarlo, which, alongside Paris Spleen, sheds light on the development of Baudelaire''s work over time. Raymond N. MacKenzie''s introductory essay discusses Baudelaire''s life and the literary climate in which he lived and worked. Focusing on the theory of the prose poem, MacKenzie suggests that Baudelaire turned to this form for both aesthetic and ethical reasons, and because the form allowed him to explore more fully the complexities of the modern, urban, human condition. By turns comic, somber, satiric, and self-questioning, Paris Spleen is one of the nineteenth century''s richest masterpieces.

The Flowers of Evil, which T. S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. The volume was seized by the police, and Baudelaire and his published were put on trial for offence to public decency. Six offending poems were banned, in a conviction that was not overturned until 1949. This bold new translation, which restores the banned poems to their original places and reveals the full richness and variety of the collection, makes available to English speakers a powerful and original version of the world. Jonathan Culler''s Introduction outlines this vision, stressing that Baudelaire is more than just the poet of the modern city. Originally to be called `The Lesbians'', The Flowers of Evil contains the most extraordinary body of love poetry. The poems also pose the question of the role of evil in our lives, of whether there are not external forces working to frustrate human plans and to enlist men and women on appalling or stultifying scenarios not of their own making. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

A comprehensive and factual essay in which Baudelaire analyses the feelings, both pleasurable and torturous, experienced by an opium user and the intense effort it takes to overcome the addiction. Delving deep into the subject, he traces the origins of the plant from which hashish is made. The essay is highly informative and serves as a warning to current and would-be opium users.

Collection of the notorious poet''s essays transcends the squalor of his financial ruin and the torture of physical decline to offer compelling thoughts on his world, society, and philosophy.

This edition contains new translations by Rosemary Lloyd of an early novella by Baudelaire and all his prose poetry. The novella, La Fanfarlo is a mocking study of love and passion and an evocation of the art of dance. There are 50 prose poems.

A bilingual edition of the works of a 19th century French master. In The Cat, one reads: "Come, cat of mine, perch on my loving breast; / Come, beauty, lie in gentle guise: / Pull in your claws, and let me plunge, possessed, / Into your agate-metal eyes."

At the time of its release in 1860, Baudelaire''s "Artificial Paradises" met with immediate praise. Beautifully wrought, this portrait of the effects of wine, opium, and hashish on the mind captures the dreamlike visions that the author experienced during his narcotic trances. **Lightning Print On Demand Title

A selection of the 19th-century French poet''s most celebrated critical writings.

Handsome edition includes great French poet''s controversial work, "Les Fleurs du Mal," plus prose poems from "Spleen of Paris," critical essays on art, music and literature, and personal letters.

Previously untranslated essays of Baudelaire, now published for the first time.

Translated articles illustrating the development of Baudelaire''s critical ideas.

Baudelaire composed the series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen between 1855 and his death in 1867. He attached great importance to his work in this then unusual form, asking, "Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?"

In this volume are assembled all of Baudelaire''s important accounts of art-exhibitions held in Paris between 1845 and 1862 : the three Salons, of which we wrote extended reviews; the Exposition Universalle, on which only three of a projected set of articles were written and published, owing to some kind of dispute with his editor - the first of these however contains a major statement of his critical method; a special exhibition held at the Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle in 1846, which gave him the opportunity to expound his views on David and his School; and the article ''Painters and Etchers'', of 1862, which includes the only reference to Manet published by Baudelaire, as well as an enthusiastic welcome to Whistler. Taken together with it''s companion-volume, The Painter of Modern Life (Phaidon, 1964), Art in Paris 1845-1862 covers the whole of Baudelaire''s preoccupation with the visual arts of his time. His greatness as a power has long been acknowledged in this country. His rights to the title of ''first aesthetician of his age'', which has often been accorded him, are now available for our consideration.

Baudelaire is one of the major innovators in French literature. His poetry is influenced by the French romantic poets of the earlier 19th century, although its attention to the formal features of verse connect it more closely to the work of the contemporary ''Parnassians''. As for theme and tone, in his works we see the rejection of the belief in the supremacy of nature and the fundamental goodness of man as typically espoused by the romantics and expressed by them in rhetorical, effusive and public voice in favor of a new urban sensibility, an awareness of individual moral complexity, an interest in vice (linked with decadence) and refined sensual and aesthetical pleasures, and the use of urban subject matter, such as the city, the crowd, individual passers-by, all expressed in highly ordered verse, sometimes through a cynical and ironic voice. Formally, the use of sound to create atmosphere, and of ''symbols'', (images which take on an expanded function within the poem), betray a move towards considering the poem as a self-referential object, an idea further developed by the Symbolists Verlaine and Mallarmé, who acknowledge Baudelaire as a pioneer in this regard.