Selected Poems

Selected Poems

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.

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Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. He travelled to the Indian Ocean but returned prematurely and never again travelled far from Paris, until his journey to Belgium the year before his death, where he suffered a stroke. He lived a bohemian lifestyle, writing, publishing and lecturing to raise money for his rather lavish tastes. His collection of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) was prosecuted for indecency. Carol Clark is a Fellow and Tutor in French at Balliol College, Oxford.