Books with author Charles Baudelaire

The poetic masterpiece of the great nineteenth-century writer Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil is one of the most frequently read and studied works in the French language. In this compelling new translation of Baudelaire's most famous collection, Keith Waldrop recasts the poet's original French alexandrines and other poetic arrangements into versets, a form that hovers between poetry and prose. Maintaining Baudelaire's complex view of sound and structure, Waldrop's translation mirrors the intricacy of the original without attempting to replicate its inimitable verse. The result is a powerful new re-imagining, one that is, almost paradoxically, closer to Baudelaire's own poetry than any previous English translation. Including the six poems banned from the first edition, this Flowers of Evil preserves the complexity, eloquence, and dark humor of its author. Brought here to new life, it is hypnotic, frank, and forceful.

Several artists like Théodore de Banville, would say that Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil is “immense, prodigious, unexpected, mingled with admiration and with some indefinable anxious fear”. Gustave Flaubert, also got amazed in the same style with Madame Bovary and praised, “You have found a way to rejuvenate Romanticism.... You are as unyielding as marble, and as penetrating as an English mist.” The poem emphasizes sex and death, which were defined as outrageous. He also pointed out on lesbianism, heavenly and irreverent love, conversion, dejection, the shortcomings of his place, guilt, torture, and liquor. The poet was noteworthy in for his poems for sense of sight and for the sense of inhaling and smelling of scents, which helped to reminisce past experiences. The Flowers of Evil was critiqued as noxious and objectionable during his life as an artist while several critiques connote some of the poems as “masterpieces of passion, art and poetry”. J. Habas in Le Figaro, steered into the controversy, “Everything in it which is not hideous is incomprehensible, everything one understands is putrid.” Baudelaire defended himself through a letter to his mother and countered that every man has every right to express his deepest thoughts and feelings in any form of art. Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a poet originally from France who was also ultimately regarded as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

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The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire Translated into English Verse by Cyril Scott Les Fleurs du mal or in English: The Flowers of Evil, is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857, it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The poems deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. The author and the publisher were prosecuted under the regime of the Second Empire as an outrage aux bonnes moeurs ("an insult to public decency"). As a consequence of this prosecution, Baudelaire was fined 300 francs. Six poems from the work were suppressed and the ban on their publication was not lifted in France until 1949. These poems were "Lesbos"; "Femmes damnees (A la pale clarte)" (or "Women Doomed (In the pale glimmer...)"); "Le Lethe"; "A celle qui est trop gaie" (or "To Her Who Is Too Gay"); "Les Bijoux" (or "The Jewels"); and " Les "Metamorphoses du Vampire" (or "The Vampire's Metamorphoses"). These were later published in Brussels in a small volume entitled Les Epaves (Scraps or Jetsam).

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