Selected Poems

In both his life and his poetry, Charles Pierre Baudelaire pushed the accepted limits of his time. His dissolute bohemian life was as shocking to his nineteenth-century readers as his poetry. Writing in classical style but with brutal honesty, Baudelaire laid bare human suffering, aspirations, and perversions.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) has proved to be the most influential of French nineteenth-century poets for the way in which his writing combines strong emotion, acute aesthetic sensibility and formal perfection with the everyday settings and language of the modern city. This volume contains 102 poems, including ninety-two from the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal and nine from the Petits Poemes en Prose together with plain prose translations by Carol Clark.

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.