De haut ou en bas, en chute libre ou durant l'essor, la vie te transperce de couleurs. Le rouge de la haine, le rose de l'amour, le bleu du bonheur. Laisse la te dévoiler son chaos, ses trésors et ses zones d'ombres. Suis les écrits de la découverte. Inities toi au mouvement cauchemardesque ou utopique. Sombre de nuance nocturne ou évade toi dans la psychose coloré. Libère ton côté sombre et cache la lumière de tes sentiments nuancés. Les coloris de tes sensations s'éteignent et l'éclat meurt. Les narcotiques se mélangeront au spleen et s'évaderont dans cette narration.

Maria Scott's study of the operation of irony in Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris contends that the principal target of the collection's spleen is its own readership. Baudelaire, as one of the most perceptive cultural commentators of the nineteenth century, was naturally very keenly aware of the growing dominance of the bourgeoisie in France, not least as a market for art and literature. Despite being dependent on this market for his own writing, the poet was highly critical of bourgeois values and attitudes. Scott builds on existing criticism of the collection to argue that these are indirectly mocked in Le Spleen de Paris, often in the person of the poet's supposed textual alter ego. The contention is that the prose poems betray the trust of readers by way of an apparent transparency of meaning that functions to blind us to their embedded irony. Though focused on Le Spleen de Paris, Scott's study engages with the full range of Baudelaire's writings, including his art and literary criticism. Her book will be of interest not only to Baudelaire scholars but also to those engaged more generally with nineteenth-century French culture.

Through its readings of Charles Baudelaire's collection Le Spleen de Paris and other prose poems from the nineteenth century, this book considers the practice of reading prose poetry and how it might be different from reading poetry in verse. Among the numerous factors that helped shape the nascent modernity in Baudelaire's poetic prose are the poems' themes, forms, linguistic qualities, and modes. The contradictions identifiable at the level of prose poetry's discourse are similarly perceptible in other aspects of Baudelaire's poetic language, beyond the discursive: in the poems' formal considerations, which retain recognisable traces of verse despite their prose presentation; and, with respect to both poetic form and thematics, in the sights and sounds that contribute to their poeticity. With a focus on what makes prose texts poetic, this study sheds light on Baudelaire the practitioner of the prose poem, as he navigated and complicated the boundaries between verse, prose, and poetry. Rather than rejecting those categories, Baudelaire forges a poetic space in which the notions of poetry and prose are recast, juxtaposed in a delicate balance in a textual space they manage to share. This coexistence of poetry and prose—previously thought of as incompatible—is the underlying tension and framework that contributes importantly to the modernity of his prose poetry. In turn, this new mode of poetry calls for new modes of reading poetry and new ways of engaging with a text.

The complete poems of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), presented with French and English versions on opposite pages.

Surprisingly, there are few book-length studies available that approach the poems in Charles Baudelaireís collection on an individual basis. Understanding "Les Fleurs du Mal" fills this gap by providing students and serious readers with clear, scholarly "explications" to many of the most widely read of Baudelaire's poems.