New Releases by Charles Baudelaire

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.

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.

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.

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.

Baudelaire''s classic work is presented through a compilation of distinguished English translations, with the original text in the book''s second half.

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.