Complete Poems

Rimbaud called Charles Baudelaire 'le premier voyant, roi des poetes, un vrai dieu'. The history of modern poetry begins with him. This is a comprehensive translation of all Baudelaire's poetry, excluding only juvenilia, occasional verse and work of doubtful attribution. Baudelaire contemplated a volume of poems that would 'launch him into the future like a cannon-ball'. Here it is in vivid and formally authoritative translation.

Charles Baudelaire was a well-known French poet, a translator, a critic, and the author of Les Fleurs du mal, Journaux intimes, and Petits poèmes en prose. Walter Martin is a poet, a translator, and the owner of Chimaera, a bookshop in Palo Alto, California. He lives near San Francisco.