Rimbaud called Charles Baudelaire 'le premier voyant, roi des poetes, un vrai dieu'. The history of modern poetry begins with him. This is a comprehensive translation of all Baudelaire's poetry, excluding only juvenilia, occasional verse and work of doubtful attribution. Baudelaire contemplated a volume of poems that would 'launch him into the future like a cannon-ball'. Here it is in vivid and formally authoritative translation.

Walter Martin is a poet and translator. Bom in Texas in 1943, he read French at Stanford, continued his studies in Paris and taught English in Nepal. He lives near San Francisco. For the past twenty-five years, he has been owner of Chimaera, a book[1]shop in Palo Alto, California, which specializes in poetry and music. He is at work on the tmaux et Camees of Theophile Gautier.