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.