Selected Poems

by Charles Baudelaire, Carol Clark (Editor)

'I have sought forgetful sleep in love; but love is nothing but a mattress of needles'

The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories and poorhouses. In love poems such as 'Le Beau Navire', flights of lyricism entwine with languorous eroticism, while prose poems such as 'La Chambre Double' deal with the agonies of artistic creation and mortality. With their startling combination of harsh reality and sublime beauty, formal ingenuity and revolutionary poetic language, these poems, including a generous selection from Les Fleurs du Mal , show Baudelaire as one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, France, 19th Century, Fiction, Literature, French Literature

229 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1860

About the author

Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later symbolist and modernist poets.

Reputation of Charles Pierre Baudelaire rests primarily on perhaps the most important literary art collection, published in Europe in the 19th century. Similarly, his early experiment Petits poèmes en prose (1868) ( Little Prose Poems ) most succeeded and innovated of the time.

From financial disaster to prosecution for blasphemy, drama and strife filled life of known Baudelaire with highly controversial and often dark tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Long after his death, his name represents depravity and vice. He seemingly speaks directly to the 20th century civilization.

Reviews

[Kevin Lopez (on sabbatical) · Rating 5 out of 5]

(From Consecration)

I know the Poet has a place apart
among the holy legions’ blessed ranks;
You will invite him to the eternal feast
of Denominations, Virtues, Thrones and Powers.

I know that pain is the one nobility
upon which Hell itself cannot encroach;
that if I am to weave my mystic crown
I must braid into it all time, all space...

But even the lost gems of ancient Palmyra,
metals sunk in the earth, pearls in the sea,
set by Your hand, could not approximate
the brightness of this perfect diadem!

for it will be made of nothing but pure light
drawn from the hallowed earth of primal rays,
of which our mortal eyes, for all their might,
are only a mournful survivor, a darkened glass.

[Adelina Traicu · Rating 3 out of 5]

*130 de pagini in limba romana*
Am avut mai mult o curiozitate in a-l citi pe Baudelaire mai mult decat pasiune, insa unele poeme chiar m-au incantat.

[Caterina · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I felt strangely blessed to discover the poetry of Baudelaire. Now, after gobbling down those evil flowers, I feel an ache in my heart, my gut - as if my soul had eaten bad seafood. What insight into the human soul in all its dark recesses. What a voice of compassion amidst the extremities of sin. How many poets could look ugliness in the eye the way he did - especially their own inner ugliness - and also see hidden beauty in the most abject of souls without denying the ugliness? But also, the ugliness hidden in beauty ...

Some of the most intense and emotionally and morally difficult poetry I've ever read is in Les Fleurs du Mal. (This edition includes the entire text of Les Fleurs du Mal - the Flowers of Evil - translated by Richard Howard, plus eight prose poems translated by Michael Hamburger.) I didn't love all the poems and found some of them repulsive or just too painful. Yet paradoxically, some of them gave me a sense of relief, a sense that here was someone who understood the more miserable aspects of "the human condition" if there is such a thing. The flowers of evil indeed. Not everyone reads him this way, but I saw a very Catholic, spiritual sensibility - the despair of a man who saw himself as an irremediable - maybe unredeemable - sinner. Like T.S. Eliot, I even feel moved to pray for Charles Baudelaire - and for all of us.

Even though my French is not very good, I'd like to get a facing page French-English edition; maybe it's just the nature of translation, but Richard Howard's verse translations, though often wonderful, sometimes seemed too heavy on the iambic-pentameter.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am breaking with my tradition here and reviewing a book that I haven't finished. I think the rules are different with poetry, also it was due back at the library. I enjoy reading Baudelaire's poetry aloud to myself, as he has such a way with assonance and rhymes. It's an entirely different experience to prose-reading. Rather than hurrying to the end, it feels natural to dwell on every paragraph; read it aloud several times to practise pronounciation, attempt a translation, read the provided translation, then read the French aloud once more. My appreciation of poetry is simplistic and uninformed, but I find Baudelaire's beautiful. I also liked the introduction that gave context to Baudelaire's life and work. At some point I'll get this book out of the library again and read further.

[Sajid · Rating 4 out of 5]

O Death, old captain, it is time! Let us weigh anchor! This country is tedious to us, o Death! Let us make ready! If the sky and the sea are as black as ink, our hearts which you know are full of rays of light.
Pour us your poison and let it strengthen us! We want, such is the fire that burns our brains, to plunge into the depths of the abyss, Hell or Heaven, what does it matter? To the depths of the unknown to find something new.

Baudelaire was fundamentaly a romantic poet. I read only a very few poems of romantic poets. And Baudelaire was new for me. So the poetic sense and emotions specially conveyed in Baudelaire's poems were provocative and intellectually stimulating. But i felt like because of the translation i couldn’t grasp the movement of emotions concisely.
Baudelaire's poems are dense with symbolic meaning, darkly surrealistic and blasphemous. And also misogynistic. In most of his poems he seduces womans brutally–anyone reading him might get aroused at some point. At the end i would say,i loved his poems and he has become a consciousness-raiser poet for me.

What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! And be sad! Tears add charm to a face as a river does to the landscape; the storm revives the flowers.
I love you above all when joy flees from your prostrate brow; when your heart is drowning in horror; when over your present there spreads the hideous cloud of the past.
I love you when your great eye pours out water hot as blood; when, in spite of my hand rocking you, your anguish, too heavy to bear, breaks through like a death-rattle.


I inhale – godlike pleasure! deep, delicious hymn! – all the sobs of your bosom, and I believe that your heart is lit up by the pearls that fall from your eyes.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading poems by Charles Baudelaire is like drinking a glass of a royal, rich, red wine.

You drink it best late in the evening,

one sip at a time.

[māris šteinbergs · Rating 5 out of 5]

ehhh, šitais džeks!

[Sherry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not at ALL what I expected. Most of this volume is from "Les Fleurs Du Mal," which I didn't learn the translation of until after I was done reading. ("The Flowers of Evil." A very fitting title.) These poems start with love, then turn into heartbreak, hatred, jealously, physical lust, drunkenness, murder, loss of soul, etc. Many are disturbing, but the feelings of loss, sorrow from love, sorrow from sin, and despair are so openly written - you can't help but feel it deeply. I would have given more stars - but for the subject matter. Wouldn't recommend to teens.

[Rags · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished reading his collection today. I took my own time with this collection. I read the Penguin edition (a simple translation) by Carol Clark.

While I find the man very misogynistic and questionable, he is also a source of light and love. Being the heavy romantic, he is, I took from him my fair share of learnings and made a distilled collection of his words, filtered to my own values, to stick by.

Also, I don't think I will anywhere find someone who goes onto mention "angels"so much in the lieu of their work.

I think that even in works you don't find particularly good, you will always have something to carry back from the time and labor you put into it, and that's how I felt navigating his work. I skimmed through a lot in the middle, but where I paused, it was indeed full of beauty. And in his words:

"the study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries before being defeated."

[Georgia]

didnt read the whole thing, just read a couple poems for class. i like Baudelaire but i dont love him yet. i hope i do someday

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

No doubt this man is a genius. There was an entire poem describing what it felt like to burrow yourself into the curly hair of a woman ~ goals ~

[Martin]

Probably reads better in the original French, & was hit or miss for me, but he certainly had a mastery over conveying the aesthetic quality of decay. Some bangers in there though.

[Thomas Armstrong · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've wanted to read Baudelaire for quite some time, and reading Walter Benjamin's essay in Illuminations provided the stimulus for me to finally do it. The first few poems struck me as overly ornamental and kind of wacko, but I grew to enjoy his delicate lyricism as I read more into the book. His synesthesia interested me since I've studied the role of synesthesia in early childhood development (in Heinz Werner's Comparative Psychology of Mental Development), and would like to read The Man Who Tasted Shapes. Clearly Baudelaire was differently-wired, perceptually and also emotionally (bipolar probably), and I really related to his Spleen poems having a mood disorder myself. In some ways I felt sorry for him, not really being recognized during his lifetime, and suffering so much, and having these weird relationships with women, but of course it's conditions like these that give rise to creative expression. I can well imagine that his poems where he worships the devil did not go over really well in 19th century France! As a rebel in his time, I'd have to say that I admire him, and will go back to him again and again to deepen my comprehension of his genius.

[Karlos · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the first 3 (of 4) stanzas of The Albatross and in memory of that I really wanted to enjoy this collection more but it’s classical construct and phrases left me cold much of the time. Baudelaire feels modern as he writes in blank verse which I find makes things more palatable for the modern casual reader of poetry and there are plenty of great lines here. But too much hyperbole and heavy sighing for me. Too much lamenting about his breast her breast.

Having said that this edition includes a couple of prose poems of which The Old Woman’s Despair is heartbreaking.

Then there was - at times- this resonance with Bukowski, which caught me by surprise. As did the nihilism, which I found was his strong point “Tiny and monotonous, the world has shown- will always show us - what we are: oases of fear in the wasteland of ennui!” Or “ - any abyss will do - “ and suchlike.

I enjoyed it and this Everyman’s edition is v.nice but I enjoyed a lot of other poetry a lot more (Basho, Kenneth Patchen, ee cummings and Larkin for example).

[Mel♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leer su antología poética me ha gustado mucho, hay que leerlo con detenimiento y reflexión para entre ver lo que quiso reflejar en sus palabras y prosas; desamores, muerte, pasión, belleza, placer y lujuria. ~"Te doy estos versos por si algún día mi nombre llega feliz a épocas lejanas, y hace soñar una noche los deseos humanos, navío favorecido por un gran viento, tu memoria, semejante a las fábulas extrañas, fatigue al lector igual que un tambor y por un fraternal y místico abrazo quede prendida en mis rimas altivas".
Más allá de la historia de su vida cargada de exceso (por cierto, recomiendo leer su biografía que es muy interesante) supo ser un revolucionario en su época tanto en vida como en letra.

[Mickey Smith]

i feel you Charles, i too am aware of the endless vice of boredom and like smells very much.

somehow i had trouble making this resonate, though i'm not sure why. it sounds derisive but lots of the poetry felt almost sort of...teenaged? in a way that prevented strong enjoyment a bit. but there were certainly elements that i did enjoy. the albatross was a nice highlight and spleen and the voyage. apparently Baudelaire translated Poe into French so some of the darker influences are clear. but can't help feeling like i wanted him to dive more into that macabre world that was just on the edges of what he was writing. i feel like perhaps my reading a translation of this took something away that might be there in French so i don't have any strong convictions about what i came away with.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were only a few poems here that I really liked. I want to give Baudelaire more credit than I do, because I know his poetry predates the EMO/vampire/goth poetry it so much resembles, but it's hard to divorce his work from all the crap that's been written in similar language. I know that Baudelaire was one of the first (if not the first) to write this morbidly, and as an original I give him credit, but the genre is now so linked with bad poetry and trite imagery (much of which Baudelaire used before it was cliche) that I as a reader can't fully accept his work.
https://youtu.be/TsYOTH3HCB4

[Emily]

I really couldn't decide whether I enjoyed Baudelaire's poetry or not. Some poems I felt were too maudlin, but others either echoed thoughts that I'd had myself or gave me new perspective. It's a toss-up. If you like Poe you'll like Baudelaire, which is unsurprising since B. was instrumental in translating Poe's works into French, and heavily styled his work after Poe's. At any rate, this collection is a nice introduction.
Favorite poem: Get Drunk

[B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Baudelaire est un poète très sensuel. La façon dont il décrit les choses et utilise ses mots est absolument fantastique. Mais pour tout ça, j'ai trouvé les poèmes plutôt superficiels. J'adore son langage, c'est juste que ses poèmes manquent la profondeur.

De plus, vous pouvez facilement voir l'influence de l'opium à certains moments.

C'est une édition bilingue, donc, j'ai pu apprécier l'original.

[Jeneé · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Baudelaire is so very unappreciated in the poetry world. His poetry is fantastic and dark and depressing and edgy. I only wish I knew how to read French so that I could get the true meaning of his work instead of getting what I can from a translated version.

[danielle; ▵ · Rating 4 out of 5]

for whatever (to-be-determined) reason, I read this collection to collect color references, so the fixation on light paled by fog and what lurks in shadows (hint: it’s prostitutes) was apparent above all else

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stretching myself… not normally in my to read pile.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Baudelaire’s perfect. Translation is mediocre at times. Can’t believe they excluded Lethe but ok.

Favourites:

“Alors ô ma beauté! Dites à la vermine
Qui vous mangera de baisers,
Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine
De mes amours décomposés!”
(Then, o my beauty, say to the vermin who will devour you with kisses, that I have kept the form and the divine essence of my decomposed loves.”) - Une Charogne/A Carcass

“Ah! Les philtres les plus forts
Ne valent pas ta paresse,
Et tu connais la caresse
Qui fait revivre les morts!”
(Ah the strongest philtres cannot equal your lazy charm, and you know the caress that brings the dead back to life!) - Chanson d’Après-Midi

“-Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune,
Où comme des remords se traînent de longs vers
Qui s’acharnent toujours sur mes morts les plus chers.”
(I am a graveyard shunned by the moon, where, like fits of remorse, long worms slither, and always choose to feed on my dearest dead.) - Spleen (LXXVI)

“Ah! Que le monde est grand à la clarté des lamps!”
(Oh, how big the world is by lamplight!) - Le Voyage

“Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?”
(Heaven or Hell what does it matter?)

“Elle aime comme on aime en automne”
(She loves as one loves in the autumn) - Un Cheval de Race

Complete poems:
-Au Lecteur
-Le Guignon
-Hymne à la Beauté
-Le Possédé
-Chant d’Automne
-Spleen (LXXV)
-Spleen (LXXVI)
-Le Crépuscule du Soir
-Les Deux Bonnes Sœurs
-La Fin de la Journée
-Les Plaintes d’un Icare
-A Une Heure du Matin
-Les Foules

[Ultramarinedream · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reread this collection prior to visiting Böse Blumen, an exhibition currently showing at Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg inspired by Les Fleurs du mal. The exhibition was excellent for anyone in Berlin who can catch it!

I can’t express with words how much I love LFDM and other poems by Baudelaire, so I’ll just copy my favourite of his here as translated by Joanna Richardson:

Joyful Death [Spleen]

In fertile earth, heavy and full of snails,
I want to dig myself a hollow grave,
And, leisurely, stretch out my mortal coil
And sleep, a shark forgotten in the waves.

I hate all testaments and funerals;
Rather than beg the world a tear to give,
I’d ask the crows to bleed my carcass foul
At all extremities while I still live

O worms! Dark neighbours without eyes or ears,
Behold a free and joyful corpse appear;
Calm revellers, the offspring of decay,

Show no remorse, and on my ruin feed,
You may still give it some new agony:
This soulless corpse, old, dead among the dead!

💀

[Erin McGarry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I take no small pleasure in finding the exact cover of the book I read on goodreads.

Baudelaire is not the poet for me (yet?) (thankfully?). I can appreciate and certainly relate to the depths of despair but am ultimately uninspired by the groove in the pavement that he wore with said pathos.

[Raya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I've found a new favourite poet.

[falaq · Rating 5 out of 5]

obsessed
officially my fave poet ever sorry rumi ✋🏼

[Rana Okandan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muthis siirler... Baudelaire de denize asikmis.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have enjoyed this book more if I had read it in French, since I don't read French well.

To call Baudelaire's poetry dark would be an understatement. In a novel I recently read, one character suggested to another that he read Baudelaire's _Les Fleurs du mal_ to understand the mind of a sadistic serial killer, and by extension, the madness that enveloped Nazi Germany. Baudelaire's poem "Spleen" is specifically mentioned as appropriate.

Knowing virtually nothing of Baudelaire except that he wrote in the mid-19th century, I was intrigued enough to buy this book. While I can't say that I enjoyed it, it was like a visit to the dentist -- much better after than during.

I often hear people remark on how the world is deteriorating and how much worse society is now than in the past. I want to tell them that exactly the opposite is true. Our world, and our treatment of one another, has never been better. Society has evolved in many respects and the velocity of the improvement has been increasing in recent years in unprecedented ways.

As Hobbes noted, the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Without resorting to a Panglossian tautology, I will point out that, at a minimum, the life of man is less solitary (thanks to the internet) and less short (thanks to advances in medicine) than it was at any time in recorded history.

Did Baudelaire open the gates of Hell and unleash its evil on a previously pure world? Of course not. Nor did he invent the ugliness and horror of the world. What he did do is enshrine for posterity the fact that the horrors of sadism and murder, and the fascination with ugliness and death have been with us as long as we've writing about ourselves. There is nothing new under the sun nor in the pits of Hell.

If one were to read these poems with one's mind set in the context of Baudelaire's life, certainly they would be shocking. In the context of today's world, though, you'd likely find the same or worse in the journal of a goth-obsessed adolescent.

[L · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure whether or not I would have given this more stars if I had read a different edition of Les Fleurs du mal, but I mostly associate Baudelaire with beautiful imagery, and this translation seemed...off somehow. This collection includes all of the poems from The Flowers of Evil (translated by Richard Howard) and a couple of the prose poems from Paris Spleen (translated by Michael Hamburger). I don't know how Howards' translations stack up against anything else out there, but here's an example from the New Directions edition of Paris Spleen (translated by Louise Varèse):

“The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.”

And from this Everyman's Library edition (trans. Michael Hamburger):

"That man who can easily wed the crowd knows a feverish enjoyment which will be eternally denied to the egoist, shut up like a trunk, and to the lazy man, imprisoned like a mollusk. The poet adopts as his own all the professions, all the joys and all the miseries with which circumstance confronts him."

Another passage from Varèse:

“There is a country that resembles you, where everything is beautiful, rich, honest and calm��where life is sweet to breathe, where happiness is wedded to silence. It is there we must live, it is there we must die.”

And the same passage from Hamburger (great name btw):

"There is a land that resembles you, where all is beautiful, rich restful and decorous...where life is sweet to the senses, where happiness is wedded to silence. It is there that we must go to live, it is there that we must go to die."

The Varèse translations sound better to my ear, but to each his own I guess.