Between 1855 and his death in 1867, Charles Baudelaire inaugurated a new-and in his own words "dangerous"-hybrid form in a series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen. Important and provocative, these fifty poems take the reader on a tour of 1850s Paris, through gleaming cafes and filthy side streets, revealing a metropolis on the eve of great change. In its deliberate fragmentation and merging of the lyrical with the sardonic, Le Spleen de Paris may be regarded as one of the earliest and most successful examples of a specifically urban writing, the textual equivalent of the city scenes of the Impressionists. In this compelling new translation, Keith Waldrop delivers the companion to his innovative translation of The Flowers of Evil. Here, Waldrop's perfectly modulated mix releases the music, intensity, and dissonance in Baudelaire's prose. The result is a powerful new re-imagining that is closer to Baudelaire's own poetry than any previous English translation.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist and art critic. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticism inherited from Romantics, but are based on observations of real life. His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du Mal ( The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrializing Paris during the mid-nineteenth century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé, among many others. He is credited as the first Modernist and believed to have coined the term modernity ( modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience.

Translator's Introduction Dedication: for Arsène Houssaye The Stranger An Old Woman's Despair The Artist's Confiteor A Joker Double Bedroom To Each His Chimæra The Fool and Venus Dog and Flask The Bad Glazier One A.M. Wild Woman and Little Darling The Crowd Widows The Old Showman Cake The Clock A Hemisphere in a Head of Hair Invitation to the Voyage A Toy for the Poor Fairy Gifts Temptations or Eros, Plutus and Glory Evening Twilight Solitude Planning Dorothea the Beautiful The Eyes of the Poor An Heroic Death The False Coin Generous Gambler The Rope Callings The Thyrsus Be Drunk Already! Windows The Urge to Paint Moon Favors Which Is the True? A Thoroughbred The Mirror The Port Mistresses Portrayed The Gallant Marksman Soup and Clouds Shooting-Gallery and Cemetery Lost Halo Mademoiselle Bistoury Anywhere Out of the World Knock Down the Poor! Good Dogs