Baudelaire composed the series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen between 1855 and his death in 1867. He attached great importance to his work in this then unusual form, asking, "Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?"

Between 1855 and his death in 1867, Charles Baudelaire inaugurated a new—and in his own words "dangerous"—hybrid form in a series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen. Important and provocative, these fifty poems take the reader on a tour of 1850s Paris, through gleaming cafes and filthy side streets, revealing a metropolis on the eve of great change. In its deliberate fragmentation and merging of the lyrical with the sardonic, Le Spleen de Paris may be regarded as one of the earliest and most successful examples of a specifically urban writing, the textual equivalent of the city scenes of the Impressionists. In this compelling new translation, Keith Waldrop delivers the companion to his innovative translation of The Flowers of Evil. Here, Waldrop's perfectly modulated mix releases the music, intensity, and dissonance in Baudelaire's prose. The result is a powerful new re-imagining that is closer to Baudelaire's own poetry than any previous English translation.

From Edouard Manet to T. S. Eliot to Jim Morrison, the reach of Charles Baudelaire's influence is beyond estimation. In this prize-winning translation of his no-longer-neglected masterpiece, Baudelaire offers a singular view of 1850s Paris. Evoking a mélange of reactions, these fifty "fables of modern life" take us on various tours led by a flâneur, an incognito stroller. Through day and night, in gleaming cafés and filthy side streets, this alienated yet compassionate esthete muses on the bizarre in the commonplace, the sublime in the mundane. As the work reveals a teeming metropolis on the eve of great change, we see a Paris as contradictory, surprising, and ultimately unknowable as our guide himself. Superbly complemented by twenty-one period illustrations by Delacroix, Callot, Manet, Whistler, Baudelaire himself, and others, The Parisian Prowler is an essential companion to Les Fleurs du Mal and other works by the father of modern poetry. In the preface to this edition, translator Edward K. Kaplan explains how the volume's illustrations act as a graphic subtext to the narrator's observations.

Famous French Poet

In the 1850s, ancien and Haussmannian Paris clash, giving birth to a violent disjunction. At that moment in time, an other present is born, a new history, like Baudelaire's poet freely abandoning his halo on the macadam. The laurel crown has been discarded; the pastoral poet is dead; classical lyric poetry is dead. The steam-driven, gaslit, electrically-charged poet is born. "Retreat Academic Muse!," Baudelaire commands, "I don't care about that old stutterer." With Paris Spleen, we move toward a new rhythm, a rhythm born of the pace, speed, and reality of a metropolis hitherto never seen or experienced. It is the rhythm of the street, of the swift-moving eye, of overloaded senses and hyper-perception, of newspapers and optical devices. Baudelaire's life spans the essential birth of whole new forms of technology, including steam locomotives, gas light, and electricity, not to speak of the typewriter and the Daguerreotype. The dandy sees and moves with the coming speed of light. His life is one lived in the midst of illumination, mechanics, and simulacra. Baudelaire's Paris is a place of experience, a metropolis that spawns unique and particular realities, a kaleidoscope of visions and mirror of alternative societies. The grist of his poems is not ancient Greece or the Renaissance. As he stated in the so-called preface to Paris Spleen, it is especially from frequenting great cities, from the crossroads of their innumerable relations, that the haunting ideal of the prose poem was born. Our flâneur wanders swiftly through crowds, in contact, but anonymous, extracting from the city material to forge his new ars poetica, like a bricolage artist. The future is called forth. The street is the new Olympus; the phantasmagoric city is a big harlot whose infernal charm continually rejuvenates the poet. The ironic, infernal beacon is the totem of the new age: the age of dissonance, the age of artificial paradises. "I love you, O infamous capital!" the poet exults. Here is Paris Spleen, an invitation to voyage, to have the entirety of Baudelaire's Paris enter into our flesh and for us to undergo contagion, if our spleens can handle it.

Charles Baudelaire is primarily remembered for his seminal collection of poems Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), which alone would guarantee him a place in the pantheon of the great figures of world poetry. However, in his later years Baudelaire always intended to publish another book of poems, namely the prose poems of Paris Spleen (Le Spleen de Paris). He thought of the prose poem as a means of going beyond the traditional poetic forms of rhyme and metre. This year marks the bicentenary of Baudelaire's birth, and this new translation of the complete prose poems pays homage to one of the greatest poets of all time.

Los peque�os poemas en prosa, tambi�n conocido como El spleen de Par�s y, en algunas traducciones, El espl�n de Par�s, es una colecci�n de 50 peque�os poemas escritos en prosa po�tica por Charles Baudelaire. El libro fue publicado p�stumamente en 1869 como parte del IV tomo de las obras completas de Baudelaire. Es considerado uno de los mayores precursores de la poes�a en prosa.Son temas recurrentes en sus poemas: la melancol�a, el horror al paso del tiempo, el deseo de infinito, la cr�tica corrosiva contra la religi�n y la moral, la burla contra los ideales que mueven a las personas y una aversi�n enorme contra la sociedad y la hipocres�a que la domina.