Reading Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem


Book Description

A study of Charles Baudelaire's Le spleen de Paris (1859) that explores how the practice of reading prose poems might be different from reading poetry in verse, illustrating how Baudelaire wrote texts that he considered poems and how this form shows aspects of his poetic modernity.




Paris Spleen


Book Description

Between 1855 and his death in 1867, Charles Baudelaire inaugurated a new—and in his own words “dangerous”—hybrid form in a series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen. Important and provocative, these fifty poems take the reader on a tour of 1850s Paris, through gleaming cafes and filthy side streets, revealing a metropolis on the eve of great change. In its deliberate fragmentation and merging of the lyrical with the sardonic, Le Spleen de Paris may be regarded as one of the earliest and most successful examples of a specifically urban writing, the textual equivalent of the city scenes of the Impressionists. In this compelling new translation, Keith Waldrop delivers the companion to his innovative translation of The Flowers of Evil. Here, Waldrop’s perfectly modulated mix releases the music, intensity, and dissonance in Baudelaire’s prose. The result is a powerful new re-imagining that is closer to Baudelaire’s own poetry than any previous English translation.




Poems in Prose


Book Description




Paris Spleen


Book Description

Between 1855 and his death in 1867, Charles Baudelaire inaugurated a new—and in his own words "dangerous"—hybrid form in a series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen. Important and provocative, these fifty poems take the reader on a tour of 1850s Paris, through gleaming cafes and filthy side streets, revealing a metropolis on the eve of great change. In its deliberate fragmentation and merging of the lyrical with the sardonic, Le Spleen de Paris may be regarded as one of the earliest and most successful examples of a specifically urban writing, the textual equivalent of the city scenes of the Impressionists. In this compelling new translation, Keith Waldrop delivers the companion to his innovative translation of The Flowers of Evil. Here, Waldrop's perfectly modulated mix releases the music, intensity, and dissonance in Baudelaire's prose. The result is a powerful new re-imagining that is closer to Baudelaire's own poetry than any previous English translation.




Paris Spleen, 1869


Book Description

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?"




Paris Spleen


Book Description

First published posthumously in 1869, "Paris Spleen" is a collection of 51 short prose poems by Charles Baudelaire. Inspired by Aloysius Bertrand's "Gaspard de la Nuit - Fantaisies a la maniere de Rembrandt et de Callot" or "Gaspard of the Night - Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot," Baudelaire remarked that he had read Bertrand's work at least twenty times for starting "Paris Spleen." A commentary on Parisian contemporary life, Baudelaire remarked on his work that "These are the flowers of evil again, but with more freedom, much more detail, and much more mockery." The themes present in "Paris Spleen" are wide-ranging. In a stream of consciousness style Baudelaire discusses pleasure, intoxication, artistry, women, poverty and social status, city life, religion, and morality. These little snapshots of daily life in the city of Paris capture the tumultuous time in which they were written, the middle of the 19th century, and establish "Paris Spleen" as a classic of the modernist literary movement.




Reading Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem


Book Description

Through its readings of Charles Baudelaire's collection Le Spleen de Paris and other prose poems from the nineteenth century, this book considers the practice of reading prose poetry and how it might be different from reading poetry in verse. Among the numerous factors that helped shape the nascent modernity in Baudelaire's poetic prose are the poems' themes, forms, linguistic qualities, and modes. The contradictions identifiable at the level of prose poetry's discourse are similarly perceptible in other aspects of Baudelaire's poetic language, beyond the discursive: in the poems' formal considerations, which retain recognisable traces of verse despite their prose presentation; and, with respect to both poetic form and thematics, in the sights and sounds that contribute to their poeticity. With a focus on what makes prose texts poetic, this study sheds light on Baudelaire the practitioner of the prose poem, as he navigated and complicated the boundaries between verse, prose, and poetry. Rather than rejecting those categories, Baudelaire forges a poetic space in which the notions of poetry and prose are recast, juxtaposed in a delicate balance in a textual space they manage to share. This coexistence of poetry and prose—previously thought of as incompatible—is the underlying tension and framework that contributes importantly to the modernity of his prose poetry. In turn, this new mode of poetry calls for new modes of reading poetry and new ways of engaging with a text.




Paris Spleen, and La Fanfarlo


Book Description

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.




Paris Spleen


Book Description

Charles Baudelaire is primarily remembered for his seminal collection of poems Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), which alone would guarantee him a place in the pantheon of the great figures of world poetry. However, in his later years Baudelaire always intended to publish another book of poems, namely the prose poems of Paris Spleen (Le Spleen de Paris). He thought of the prose poem as a means of going beyond the traditional poetic forms of rhyme and metre. This year marks the bicentenary of Baudelaire's birth, and this new translation of the complete prose poems pays homage to one of the greatest poets of all time.




The Beauty of Baudelaire


Book Description

This book offers the first comprehensive close reading in any language of the complete works of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Taking full account of his critical writings on literature and the fine arts, it provides fresh readings of Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris. It situates these works within the context of nineteenth-century French literature and culture and reassesses Baudelaire's reputation as the 'father' of modern poetry. Whereas he is traditionally considered to have rejected the public role of the writer as moralist, educator, and political leader and to have dedicated himself instead to the exclusive pursuit of beauty in art, this book contends not only that he rejected Art for Art's sake but that he saw in 'beauty'—defined not as an inherent quality but as an effect of harmony and rich conjecture—an alternative ethos with which to resist the tyrannies of ideology and conformism. Contrarian in his thinking and provocatively innovative in his poetic practice, Baudelaire fell foul of the law when six poems in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) were banned for obscenity. In the second edition (1861), substantially recast and enlarged, the poet as alternative lawgiver made plainer still his resistance to the orthodoxies of his day. In a series of major critical articles he proclaimed the 'government of the imagination', while from 1855 until his death he developed an alternative literary form, the prose poem—a thing of beauty and an invitation to imagine the world afresh, to make our own rules.