The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo

by Charles Baudelaire, Rosemary Lloyd (Translator)

Although best known for his collection of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire was also a gifted and inventive prose writer. In combining certain of the restrictions of poetic form with the freedom of prose, he sought a form of language capable of conveying the complexity, cacophony, and unexpected juxtapositions of city life. Like his verse, the prose poems are rich in psychological insights and reveal the ability both to select precisely those tiny details that raise the banal to the ironic and to create verbal patterns and rhythms that subtly underpin or throw into question the surface meaning of the language. This collection of all Baudelaire's prose poetry also includes the novella La Fanfarlo, a gently mocking study of love and passion that brilliantly evokes the art of dance.

Genres: Poetry

150 pages, Paperback

Published June 6, 1991

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

[Allen]

Les Poemes en Prose are wonderful. as with Oscar Wilde, you take the world weary narrator as is. Much of the prose poetry is narrative, tho often with a glancing intention of completion. the humour can be devastating, but this does not undermine the more rococo and romanced passages. I never really caught Baudelaire's traditional poetry, the translations I've seen are weak and my French did not discover great felicities (ALbatross!!)(Monty Python reference), but the prose, in English and in French, rocks seriously. vraiment.

[RJ]

The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo (Oxford World's Classics) by Charles Baudelaire (1991)