Selected Poems

The poems of Charles Baudelaire, collected as Les Fleurs du Mal, are filled with unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity subjects dismissed as unpoetic by French literary conventions of the time. 'Tableaux parisiens' describes the poor, the criminal and the forgotten of the modern city - thieves, poets, drunkards, flaunting prostitutes and faded old ladies - yet manages to find beauty in the anonymous settings of their lives. The love poems of 'Spleen et Ideal' combine flights of lyricism and languorous eroticism with sudden, strikingly prosaic detail. Baudelaire's prose poems, to which he gave the title Le Spleen de Paris, contain everything from topical, aggressively political humour to evocations of the rapture inspired by opium. This edition presents the poems in French with English prose translations, and includes an introduction, suggestions for further reading, a glossary and an index of titles and first lines.

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.