The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire: With an Introductory Preface by James Huneker

Charles Baudelaire mapped the secret geography of modern despair like no poet before or since. This collection gathers the poems and prose poems of the Frenchman who invented a new literary form while chronicling his own dissolution in the city that made him: Paris. Here are the famous verses about spleen and ideal, the dandy's weary elegance, the prostitute's sad beauty, the cadaver blooming in the garden. Here too are the prose poems, those hallucinatory fragments where Baudelaire pursued beauty into its darkest alleys, whether stimulated by hasheesh or simply by the toxic atmosphere of the modern metropolis. James Huneker's preface provides context for the poet's legendary suffering his lifetime, the obscenity trials, the poverty, the early decay but the writing needs no introduction. These are poems written in blood on the walls of the 19th century, yet they speak with perfect clarity to anyone who has felt the modern condition: that sickness of the soul, that longing for the infinite in a world that offers only commodities. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where modern poetry began and why it so often sounds like a cry in a locked room.