Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal

by Charles Baudelaire

Overview

Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" marks the intrusion of modernity into the French poetic tradition. The carefully ordered collection (here presented in its 1861 edition) betrays a frighteningly honest poet grappling witha sense of his own deep spiritual imperfection, a recognition too of his creative difficulty and an ambivalent teetering on the boundary between the radical and the conservative. As no other poet had done before (and only a few have managed since), Baudelaire sustains in a single collection an exploration of sin, suffering, love, sexual desire, memory, beauty, the city, and the fundamental human impulse towards the new and the unknown - and all this in verse that resonates with a fresh timbre and persuades through its mysterious 'rhetorique profonde'. This critical edition urges the reader to join the poet in his journey from benediction to death, to become a fellow traveller along the route towards 'le nouveau'.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781853993442
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/01/1998
Series:	French Texts
Edition description:	French Language Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Graham Chesters is Professor of French and Director of the Institute for Learning at the University of Hull; he is the author of "Baudelaire and the Poetics of Craft" (1998), as well as many articles on French poetry.

Editorial Reviews

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Lord Byron
Emily Dickinson
John Donne
Thomas Hardy
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John Keats
Edgar Allan Poe
Arthur Rimbaud
Christina Rossetti
William Shakespeare
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Wallace Stevens
Walt Whitman
William Wordsworth
Animal Poems
Erotic Poems
Friendship Poems
Love Poems
Prayers

From the Publisher