Les Fleurs du mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857, it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The poems deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.
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.
"Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press" Immediately after the publication of "Les Fleurs du Mal" in 1857, Baudelaire was prosecuted and found guilty of obscenity and blasphemy. Today, "Les Fleurs du Mal" is considered by many to be the most important and influential poetry collection published in Europe in the 19th century. For Baudelaire, love was the essence of the forbidden, and he saw the individual as a divided being, drawn equally towards good and evil, the ideal and the sensual. His originality sets him apart from the dominant literary schools of his time and his poetry is regarded as the last brilliant summation of Romanticism, the precursor of Symbolism, and the first expression of Modernity. This volume brings together, for the first time, "Les Fleurs du Mal" and the original etchings by Odilon Redon inspired by the text. These wonderful examples of the work of Odilon Redon, the greatest of the French Symbolists, depict the world of fantasy, which he believed few dared to envision.
Upon its original publication in 1857 Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" or "The Flowers of Evil" was embroiled in controversy. Within a month of its publication the French authorities brought an action against the author and the book's publisher claiming that the work was an insult to public decency. Eventually the French courts would acknowledge the literary merit of Baudelaire's work but ordered that six poems in particular should be banned from subsequent publication. The notoriety caused by this scandal would ultimately work in the author's favor causing the initial publication to sell out, thus prompting the publication of another edition. The second edition was published in 1861, it included an additional thirty-five poems, with the exclusion of the six poems censored by the French government. In this volume we reproduce that 1861 edition along with the six censored poems in an English translation by William Aggeler along with the original French. Rich with symbolism, "The Flowers of Evil" is rightly considered a classic of the modernist literary movement. Its themes of decadence and eroticism seek to exhibit Baudelaire's criticism of the Parisian society of his time. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and includes an introduction by Frank Pearce Sturm.
Baudelaire was practically unknown in Spain until the last two decades of the nineteenth century when the first important criticism of his work was published by two famous critics, Juan Valera and Clarín. Valera attacked Les Fleurs du mal on aesthetic grounds, basing his criticism entirely on the "satanic" poems. At the same time, Clarín published a series of articles favorable to Baudelaire. Save for Clarín, Spanish critics in the first two decades of the twentieth century based their opinions of Baudelaire solely on Les Fleurs du mal. A notable exception was an article written around 1910 by Emilia Pardo Bazan based on the full scope of Baudelaire's work. Since the 1920s Spanish critics have come to share the high esteem which Baudelaire continues to receive throughout the world.
One of the founding texts of literary modernism. 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.
From Edouard Manet to T. S. Eliot to Jim Morrison, the reach of Charles Baudelaire's influence is beyond estimation. In this prize-winning translation of his no-longer-neglected masterpiece, Baudelaire offers a singular view of 1850s Paris. Evoking a mélange of reactions, these fifty "fables of modern life" take us on various tours led by a flâneur, an incognito stroller. Through day and night, in gleaming cafés and filthy side streets, this alienated yet compassionate esthete muses on the bizarre in the commonplace, the sublime in the mundane. As the work reveals a teeming metropolis on the eve of great change, we see a Paris as contradictory, surprising, and ultimately unknowable as our guide himself. Superbly complemented by twenty-one period illustrations by Delacroix, Callot, Manet, Whistler, Baudelaire himself, and others, The Parisian Prowler is an essential companion to Les Fleurs du Mal and other works by the father of modern poetry. In the preface to this edition, translator Edward K. Kaplan explains how the volume's illustrations act as a graphic subtext to the narrator's observations.
Les Fleurs du mal, once the most infamous book of poems in French literature, became in the twentieth century the most famous, and the most admired: its challenge to convention when it was first published in 1857 led to its judicial condemnation, but it owes its 'landmark' status to the sheer aesthetic quality of its verses. In this volume, Professor Leakey provides a newly comprehensive guide to the understanding and appreciation of Les Fleurs du mal, offering fresh insights into its composition, themes and style (sound as well as sense), and setting it in its historical context. A whole chapter is devoted to Baudelaire's crowning poetic achievement, Le Cygne, and the book includes a detailed index to individual poems as well as a guide to further reading.
