Selected Poems

‘I have sought forgetful sleep in love; but love is nothing but a mattress of needles’

The poems of Charles Baudelaire, collected as Les Fleurs du Mal, are filled with unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity subjects dismissed as unpoetic by French literary conventions of the time. ‘Tableaux parisiens’ describes the poor, the criminal and the forgotten of the modern city – thieves, poets, drunkards, flaunting prostitutes and faded old ladies – yet manages to find beauty in the anonymous settings of their lives. The love poems of ‘Spleen et Idéal’ combine flights of lyricism and languorous eroticism with sudden, strikingly prosaic detail. Baudelaire’s prose poems, to which he gave the title Le Spleen de Paris, contain everything from topical, aggressively political humour to evocations of the rapture inspired by opium.

This edition presents the poems in French with English prose translations, and includes an introduction, suggestions for further reading, a glossary and an index of titles and first lines.

Les Epaves
Les Epaves
Galanteries
Pièces diverses

Poems Added in 1868
Other Verse Poems
Petits Poëmes en prose
Glossary
Index of Titles and First Lines