Book Description
Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernistpoetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire's World provides English- language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts thatwill lead to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of the great French poet'swork.

Rosemary Lloyd considers all of Baudelaire's writing, including his criticism,theory, and letters, as well as poetry. In doing so, she sets the poemsthemselves in a richer context, in a landscape of real places populated withactual people. She shows how Baudelaire's poetry was marked by the influence ofthe writers and artists who preceded him or were his contemporaries. Lloydbuilds an image of Baudelaire's world around major themes of his writing- childhood, women, reading, the city, dream, art, nature, death. Throughout, shefinds that his words and themes echo the historical and physical realities oflife in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.

Lloyd also explores the possibilities and limitations of translation. As anintegral part of her treatment of the life, poetry, and letters of her subject,she also reflects on published translations of Baudelaire's work and offers someof her own translations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Topical Study
"Baudelaire's World" is a book-length collection of topical essays on various aspects of Baudelaire's life and work, including: Childhood, Women, Friendship, Nature, and others. The focus throughout is on their relationship to his poetry, with extensive quotations and translations from Les Fleurs du Mal. Overall, though, this book falls between the stools of biography and criticism; the author's scattershot format and approach does not seem to provide enough of either, and I think that most readers would get more out of a conventional biography (and if you've already read one, then Lloyd doesn't really seem to have that much to add.) For once, the publisher's review actually says it best: this is mostly a book for libraries that just want to collect a large amount of Baudelaire-related material.

A Sardonic Smile
Lloyd's book has been criminally underappreciated, and you don't find people recommending it the way they should.After five years, you'd think such an important volume would be crawling with commentators, instead Cornell University Press has failed to support it with proper publicity and backup.The designers did Lloyd no favors by carrying through the skeezy looking cover, replete with "Rosemary Lloyd" written in letters imitating Baudelaire's handwriting, but perhaps subconsciously this makes a mental link between readers who intuit that she was maybe a friend of the French symbolist poet, if there are scraps of his handwriting containing her John Hancock.Oh, photoshop, what miracles of deception are committed in your name!And that cryptic portrait of CB: when I was an American boy growing up in France, we had a secret club in which we would practice imitating the famous "Baudelaire smile," said to be the inspiration for French joviality a la Maurice Chevalier.With one hand on a mirror and the other on a rotogravure of the famous portrait by Deroy, we would try to adopt his serene nonchalance by contorting our teen mouths into traditional rosebud grins; like the smile of the Mona Lisa, however, Baudelaire's trademark expression has often been imitated, never successfully.In the French equivalent of the 8th grade, many duels were fought with rattan canes sharpened to points like punji sticks.It's refreshing to read Lloyd's book in conjunction with Andrew Epstein's marvelous new book of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka (BEAUTIFUL ENEMIES) in terms of the shifting ground of friendship between 19th and 20th centuries.As Lloyd sees it, Baudelaire's generation made large claims for friendship.In her chapter, "Talking with Friends," she tests the limits of a conventional biographical approach by analyzing Baudelaire's different sorts of community, contrasting him always with Victor Hugo, whose poetry is frequently evoking his friends by name and rank.Some mysteries remain in Baudelairology: for example, if Banville was his greatest friend, why is there so little direct track of his spoor among Baudelaire's effects?Lloyd is dissatisfied with the state of English translation of Baudelaire's work, both in poetry and prose, and often provides her own translations every time she needs to trot one out.They are charming indeed, and serve her master well.

A monumental book worthy of its own title, BAUDELAIRE'S WORLD should become the standard book of its kind.It should not be relegated to Cornell's remainder table.Fie on that foolishness!The great poet of perceptions deserves a critical literature worthy of that enigmatic stare, or do you think, Da Vinci Code style, he knew way in advance that Rosemary Lloyd's book would be heaped in obscurity a mere 5 years after publication?No wonder he's sardonic.It's a French thing after all. ... Read more

Book Description
Here, for the first time, the work of three of Frances greatest poets has been published in a single volume: the sensual and passionate glow of Charles Baudelaire, the desperate intensity and challenge of Arthur Rimbaud, and the absinthe-tinted symbolist songs of Paul Verlaine.

To bring the essence of these three giants of modern poetry to the American public, Joseph M. Bernstein, a noted interpreter and translator of French literature, has selected the most representative of their writings and presented them along with a biographical and critical introduction.

"Not to know these three poets", he points out, "is to deprive oneself of a pleasure as rare as it is indispensable to any real understanding of the aims and direction of modern literature.

The volume includes Arthur Symons' unabridged translation of Flowers of Evil and the Prose Poems of Baudelaire; Louise Varese's translation of Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and Prose Poems from "Illuminations"; J. Norman Cameron's translation of the verse from the Illuminations; and a representative selection from Verlaine's verse translated by Gertrude Hall and Arthur Symons. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Symbolist Poets Highlighted in Tight Volume
"Baudelaire Rimbaud Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems" carries with it a strong selection of each poet's better known poems. Collecting these three, specifically, is in tune with their own sense of language and image.

The translations work splendidly for all three poets, as executed by several different translators. As such, the pieces chosen are encumbered or glorified by their own merit, and not of the hurdles and interpretative biases of language.

I first learned of Arthur Rimbaud, ironically, from my religion teacher at a Catholic high school. As the first French poet I was introduced I felt, then, obligated to like his work. However, now, in seeing him compared to the much greater Baudelaire, Rimbaud comes across self-indulgent and meaningless. I gain no pleasure from reading his work, and consider, of these three, him to be far overrated.

Paul Verlaine, for me, is somewhere in-between. His romance with Rimbaud (scandalous then, as he dumped his infant daughter and young wife for Rimbaud) luckily did not reduce his poetry to wandering colors and images. Occasionally, he is even cliche:

Oh, heavy, heavy my despair
Because, because of One so fair.
(from Verlaine's "Oh, Heavy, Heavy")

And occasionally brilliant:

Hills and fences hurry by
Blent in greenish-rosy flight,
And the yellow carriage-light
Blurs all to the half-shut eye
(from Verlaine's "Brussels")

Baudelaire's prose poem selections are too many here. They do not meet up in quality with his more tightly articulated poetry. The section, "Flowers of Evil," though, is a masterful, though bitter, book within a book.

Throughout "Flowers," Baudelaire defies God, but never denies his existence or power, as seen here in"St Peter's Denial,"

What has God done with all this flood of sacrifices?
Which rises to his Seraphim divine?
As a tyrant intoxicated with his wine
His fearful sleep is haunted by his vices.

I fully recommend "Baudelaire Rimbaud Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems." While I cannot so I am an exuberant fan of any of them, their influence on poets I completely embrace I acknowledge, and am pleased to have become better aware of them.

Anthony Trendl
HungarianBookstore.com

poets of evil
I think I have a better instinctual understand of these "decadents" who were the clear marking of the break between the old aesthetic rationality and the surrealism, symbolism, etc. thatfollowed--those who actually blend the periods, smudge and blur the twoworldviews, like Poe and Blake and, here, Baudelaire do. I likeBaudelaire's phantasmagoria, his exoticism put in service of delivering aconcrete insight. And I especially like it when the poetic histrionics of"Flowers of Evil" give way to the fascinating prose poems--like"The Confiteor of the Artist" or the marvellouswar-against-poetry volley "The Courteous Marksman." Other fineones (reminding me also of Lovecraft)--"The Evil Glazier,""At One O'Clock in the Morning," "Solitude." There'smisanthropy, insight and occult broodishness here of the most useful sort.

Rimbaud and Verlaine didn't grip me as strongly--I appreciate that theystretched artistic boundaries, but what they have done intrinsically Idon't find as rich. Rimbaud's religious ravings and visions I findintelligent but obscurant (like Wallace Stevens)--he's doing someconstructive deconstruction, but it's hardly readable (though I do like themore coherent symbolism of the famed "Drunken Boat"). AndVerlaine, while he has the occasional dead-on whimsical insight, is a bittoo florid in verbiage, classical in form, and even conventional for me.With these latter two poets, I think my concern with translated poetry alsomust come in at full force--this sort of wordplay and deliberatesuggestiveness must be highly dependent on the nuance of the originalwords, and must therefore lose something considerable in English.--J.Ruch ... Read more

Product Description
Study guide for the poetry section of the French Literature Advance Placement Exam. Updated for 2008 examination. ... Read more

Book Description

From the introduction by Michael Hamburger:

"Baudelaire's prose poems were written at long intervals during the last twelve or thirteen years of his life. The prose poem was a medium much suited to his habits and character. Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty. His thinking about society and politics, as about everything else, was experimental; like the thinking of most poets it drew on experience and imagination, rather than on facts and general arguments. That is another reason why the prose poem proved a medium so congenial to Baudelaire."

Customer Reviews (2)

One of the first modern poets
Modernity is what defines the work of Baudelaire. No elegant poems of love; no countryside-dreaming; no evocation of the Classics nor references to the past. On the contrary: urban life; the alienation brought aboout by capitalism; the angst of poor urban dwellers; alcohol and drugs. Poetry is no more just the search for beauty through words. Now, it is a vehicle for the expression of the individual. Content is more important than form, and therefore Baudelaire gets rid of the constraints imposed by verse, even free verse, and lets his soul spill out in a not lyrical, but dark manner.

Evocative
These prose poems were my first experience with Baudelaire.I didn't know what to expect, but they're pretty good.They are often vague, but even then manage to be evocative.I'll admit I also bought the book to help myFrench along (as it is bilingual), but it's Baudelaire and it's good andsometimes thought-provoking reading.Enivrez-vous!De vin, de poesie, devertu, a votre guise.Enjoy. ... Read more

Book Description
This edition contains all of Baudelaire's fifty prose poems as well as his wry novella of love and passion La Fanfarlo.In combining aspects of poetic form with the freedom of prose, Baudelaire creates a rich form of language capable of conveying, with much wit and irony, the complex sensual excess of city life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Baudelaire at fine consistency.
What makes "La Fanfarlo"interesting is not so much for its depth but rather at the way it captures the bourgeoise flavor & appeal magnificently.Though it probes very well into human characteristics & nature vividly,it's realistic portrayal of that air of condescence & mannerisms which separate this class of society from the rest is nothing short of marvelous as it takes you to it's very world & initiates you if you are not aware.

The prose poems are the younger siblings of "The Flowers Of Evil".Though lacking in range & depth compared to the incomparable masterpiece,it nontheless elevates the reader into the emotional & intellectual mindscapes that the poet so accurately & efficiently defines.Truth & beauty go hand in hand inseparably well together,just as art & practicality give a slight glimpse into the life of a city from the point of a bitingly penetrating observer. ... Read more

Book Description
The inner torments of the poet, critic, and translator are revealed in his letters to his mother over the course of 33 years and ending just prior to his death at the age of 46._"The intimate and profoundly moving letters reveal the tragedy of a sensitive mind, reveal the heartbreaking bitterness and hope and struggle of a man unfitted to combat the implacabilities of life."THE INDEPENDENT ... Read more

Book Description
The classic works of literature contained in each of these volumes represent each author's best and most famous writings. A wonderful introduction to world literature, this finely crafted and affordable series offers the works of these world-renowned authors to a wider audience. IncludesArtificial Paradise, The Flowers of Evil, La Fanfarlo, and On Wine and Hashish

Las obras clásicas de literatura en cada volumen son una representación de los mejores y más famosos escritos de los autores. Una introducción maravillosa a la literatura universal, esta serie hermosamente diseñada pone las obras de los autores mundialmente conocidos al alcance de todos. ... Read more