Poetry Readers Challenge discussion
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The Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen
2018 Reviews
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The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
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I admit I've only sampled this book so I'm interested to hear your impressions, and that it isn't all dark. I think I do have a volume around...
Nice to hear about the translator. Sometimes we are poor judges of our own abilities, for better or worse.
cheers
I know I read this over 40 years ago, long before I started writing poetry, but damned if I remember anything about it. Perhaps the fact that it didn’t make the cut when we moved to a smaller house tells all.
I have to admit I thought it was outdated with too many flowers and not enough evil. In other words, for me it was pretty boring.
Here is a link to my review. I included a few historical details about the book: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
This poet and this work hardly need any introduction by me, so I will just give my impression in a series of 6 statements.
1. I survived his adolescent period but was relieved when he began to tackle more varied subject matter than women's bodies.
2. I hadn't realized he was such a sonneteer!
3. While the title of this volume put me off, I enjoyed the different ways it could be taken while reading through the poems.
4. I was expecting something darker and was pleasantly surprised by the variety of mood and tone, though as the title suggests, it does not shy away from darker subject matter and moods.
5. I'm on board with him as one of the greats just from this volume but I expect to enjoy the prose poems of Paris Spleen much more than the formal poetry of Flowers of Evil.
6. I can see how these poems as a group would resonate more and more with repeated readings; however, I can't say that I, personally, enjoyed them enough the first time around to delve into them that deeply.
Lastly, I want to share that the translator was a physician, a hematologist, in the US Military for whom the translations were a personal project. When he finished translating Flowers of Evil, he put the project away and might not have made any attempt to publish it if his son had not pressed him to do so and offered to shop it around. Al Poulin, which may be a familiar name to some people, got hold of it and further pressed that Crosby translate the prose poems of Paris Spleen. I look forward to reading that in early 2019.