Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal (French Texts) - Softcover

Baudelaire, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853993441 ISBN 13: 9781853993442

Publisher: Bristol Classical Press, 1998

Synopsis

Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" marks the intrusion of modernity into the French poetic tradition. The carefully ordered collection (here presented in its 1861 edition) betrays a frighteningly honest poet grappling witha sense of his own deep spiritual imperfection, a recognition too of his creative difficulty and an ambivalent teetering on the boundary between the radical and the conservative. As no other poet had done before (and only a few have managed since), Baudelaire sustains in a single collection an exploration of sin, suffering, love, sexual desire, memory, beauty, the city, and the fundamental human impulse towards the new and the unknown - and all this in verse that resonates with a fresh timbre and persuades through its mysterious 'rhetorique profonde'. This critical edition urges the reader to join the poet in his journey from benediction to death, to become a fellow traveller along the route towards 'le nouveau'.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Modern poetry begins with Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), who employed his unequalled technical mastery to create the shadowy, desperately dramatic urban landscape -- populated by the addicted and the damned -- which so compellingly mirrors our modern condition. Deeply though darkly spiritual, titanic in the changes he wrought, Baudelaire looms over all the work, great and small, created in his wake.

From the Back Cover:

Modern Poetry begins with Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), who employed his unequaled technical mastery to create the shadowy, desperately dramatic urban landscape--populated by the addicted and the damned.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bristol Classical Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1853993441
• ISBN 13: 9781853993442
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Chesters Graham