This volume contains four thoughtful essays prepared by eminent Baudelaire scholars to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of Baudelaire. Each of these essays deals with a very different aspect of the poet's genius and influence: his love poetry, his aesthetic ideas, and his relation to Manet and to Rimbaud. Henri Peyre of Yale University interprets Baudelaire's love poems in an independent and original way against a rich background of comparative material. René Galand of Wellesley College shows how Baudelaire's aesthetics may be related to present-day anthropological thinking. Marcel Ruff of the University of Nice traces the positive and negative aspects of Baudelaire's relationship to Rimbaud. And Francis and Lois Boe Hyslop of The Pennsylvania State University clarify the personal and artistic relationship of the poet-critic to the painter Manet. Through the variety of subjects and approaches, the reader will find interesting threads of connection that link these essays together--threads that have their source in the complex mind of Baudelaire.

Inspired by the great tradition of French love poetry, New Directions presents a beautiful, small gift edition, dedicated to what makes the world go round. Filled with devotion and lust, sensuality and eroticism, fevers and overtures, these poems showcase some of the most passionate verses in the French language. From the classic sixteenth-century love sonnets of Louise Labé and Maurice Sceve to the piercing lyricism of the Romantics and the dreamlike compositions of the Surrealists, French Love Poems is the perfect, seductive gift for anyone who makes your heart flutter. This collection includes poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, Claude Cahun, René Char, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Paul Éluard, Louise Labé, Stéphane Mallarmé, Anna de Noailles, Joyce Mansour, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and many others; as well as translations by Mary Ann Caws, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Frederick Seidel, Richard Sieburth, and William Carlos Williams.

This volume contains four thoughtful essays prepared by eminent Baudelaire scholars to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of Baudelaire. Each of these essays deals with a very different aspect of the poet's genius and influence: his love poetry, his aesthetic ideas, and his relation to Manet and to Rimbaud. Henri Peyre of Yale University interprets Baudelaire's love poems in an independent and original way against a rich background of comparative material. René Galand of Wellesley College shows how Baudelaire's aesthetics may be related to present-day anthropological thinking. Marcel Ruff of the University of Nice traces the positive and negative aspects of Baudelaire's relationship to Rimbaud. And Francis and Lois Boe Hyslop of The Pennsylvania State University clarify the personal and artistic relationship of the poet-critic to the painter Manet. Through the variety of subjects and approaches, the reader will find interesting threads of connection that link these essays together--threads that have their source in the complex mind of Baudelaire.

Perhaps the most explosively original mind of his century, Charles Baudelaire has proved profoundly influential well beyond the borders of nineteenth-century France. Writers from Lord Alfred Douglas to Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Aldous Huxley to Seamus Heaney, from Arthur Symons to John Ashbery, from Basil Bunting to Robert Lowell, have all attempted to transmit in English his psychological and sexual complexity, his images of urban alienation. This superb addition to the Poets in Translation series brings together the translations of his poetry and prose poems that best reveal the different facets of Baudelaire's personality: the haughtily defiant artist, the tormented bohemian, the savage yet tender lover, and the celebrant of strange and haunted cityscapes.

This volume contains four thoughtful essays prepared by eminent Baudelaire scholars to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of Baudelaire. Each of these essays deals with a very different aspect of the poet's genius and influence: his love poetry, his aesthetic ideas, and his relation to Manet and to Rimbaud. Henri Peyre of Yale University interprets Baudelaire's love poems in an independent and original way against a rich background of comparative material. René Galand of Wellesley College shows how Baudelaire's aesthetics may be related to present-day anthropological thinking. Marcel Ruff of the University of Nice traces the positive and negative aspects of Baudelaire's relationship to Rimbaud. And Francis and Lois Boe Hyslop of The Pennsylvania State University clarify the personal and artistic relationship of the poet-critic to the painter Manet. Through the variety of subjects and approaches, the reader will find interesting threads of connection that link these essays together--threads that have their source in the complex mind of Baudelaire.