Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry
1857
Charles Baudelaire's 1857 masterwork scandalized France and invented modern poetry as we know it. In these pages, the poet transforms Paris into a landscape of the soul, where gaslit streets become corridors of spiritual desolation and every beautiful woman carries the seed of her own decay. The collection presents Baudelaire's revolutionary prose poems alongside selections from 'The Flowers of Evil,' each verse vibrating with his central obsession: the impossible gap between the ideal and the real, between the heavenly and the rotting. Here you will find the spleen that crushed him and the ideal that eluded him, the city's crushed poor and the intoxication that promises forgetting. This is Baudelaire at his most raw: documenting his own spiritual crisis, his longing for death and transcendence, his embrace of artificial paradises. His influence extends through every poet who came after, but no one matched his particular alchemy of despair and beauty, his willingness to stare unflinching at what society demanded he hide.
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“My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.””
— Charles Baudelaire
“I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight.””
— Charles Baudelaire
“The Poet is a kinsman in the cloudsWho scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.””
— Charles Baudelaire
“But the true voyagers are only those who leaveJust to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons,They never turn aside from their fatalityAnd without knowing why they always say: "Let's go!””
— Charles Baudelaire
“And yetto wine, to opium even, I preferthe elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;and in the wasteland of desireyour eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.””
— Charles Baudelaire
“Through the Unknown, we'll find the New””
— Charles Baudelaire
“Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.””
— Charles Baudelaire
“the Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love””
— Charles Baudelaire
“But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?””
— Charles Baudelaire
