Letters of Charles Baudelaire to His Mother 1833-1866 by Charles Baudelaire

15-18 of the brochure: 'The Double Room,' 'Get Drunk,' 'Crowds,' 'The Port,' 'The Soup and The Clouds'ġ. Here are some questions to consider as you're reading the prose poems on pp. His eye weighted with an involuntary tear, he dreams of scaffolds while smoking his hookah”. It is related to the more traditional “ennui” (a word English takes from French), which in “To the Reader” (“Au lecteur” in Les Fleurs du mal) Baudelaire allegorically transformed into the deadliest of sins: “Although he does not make a big stir or a big fuss, he would willingly make the earth a ruin, and in a yawn swallow the world…. 'The word “spleen” in French is taken directly from English and denotes a particularly modern and thus somewhat “alien” form of melancholy. In fact, Baudelaire came to believe that modern beauty could be born only from this intimate association of the two contrasting elements.'Ĭ.

There is little doubt, as Lemaitre has shown, that the art of Daumier, Guys, and Méryon, as well as the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, did much to encourage and inspire in Baudelaire the mingling of the strange and commonplace. Baudelaire could well have been describing certain of his own prose poems, some of which were actually inspired by the great caricaturist. In many of his prose poems Baudelaire was actually doing what he maintained Daumier had succeeded in accomplishing: “You will see passing before your eyes all that a great city contains of living monstrosities-all that it harbors of the fearful, the grotesque, the sinister or the farcical” (OC, 2:554). Not that he had failed to do just that in certain poems of Les Fleurs du mal-but there is little doubt that it was easier to introduce into prose various tones such as irony, sarcasm, and cruelty without diminishing the poetic effect. 'There is little doubt that the use of prose made it easier for the poet to utilize both modern and urban subjects and also to combine, as he wrote to his mother on 9 March 1865, “the terrifying with the comic, and even love with hate” (Corr., 2:473). His greatest prose is found in his criticism, his studies of the “artificial paradises” of intoxicants, and the Petits poèmes en prose (Paris Spleen, collected 1869).'ī.

'Baudelaire holds his place in world literature as the author of a book of poetry, Les fleurs du mal, yet this slim volume occupies only one out of the seven volumes in the first collected edition (1868-1870). Background considerations and discussionĪ.

Charles Baudelaire, Little Poems in Prose (1869)

Letters of Charles Baudelaire to His Mother 1833-1866 by Charles Baudelaire