Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77476 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-28
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Customer Reviews

everything you wanted to read by Baudelaire - EVER!
I don't care whether Baudelaire was a Satanist or not, he wrote some fascinating things anyway. The reason I chose this edition, superficial individual that I am, was because of its handsome Art-Deco cover. Books should look nice on the shelf. That said, this is not going to stay on the shelf for long, as it contains both the poetry collection 'Flowers Of Evil' and 'Spleen of Paris' PLUS several critical essays, including 'The Painter of Modern Life'. What's more, it includes the original French text so you can revive your dying school French and pretend you're a coffee-drinking Left Bank intellectual who understands it in the original...or maybe that's just me. Anyway, if you're even vaguely interested in literature or modernism, this is a good book to own.

The Father of Modernity?
This book reads like molten metal in one's hands. I came back to this translation by default (I am not a French speaker), having been deeply impressed by another translation many years ago. I write a bit of poetry myself, though of nothing like the same order of course. However, reading these ratcheted my own inner wordsmith into overdrive, and lots of stuff came pouring out. So how could I not be grateful?

It is my intention now to find a set of complete Baudelaire, and also to investigate his biography and a bit of criticism. This is because, it seems to me, that we see in these poems some of the threads that were ultimately to emerge as the cutural movement of Modernism, for the first time, at least to my limited awareness. Perhaps the explicitly agonised paintings of Delacroix, Goya and Velasquez provide prior antecedents? We see the clear intent to shock the complacency of the bourgeoisie. The cultivation of a repuation for evil as a direct challenge to popular notions of what indeed constituted good and evil. In fact I detect in him a man of great paradox, who used the sinister and the evil to hold up a mirror to his times, in the all too knowingly vain hope of awakening his fellows to compassion. A theme we see repeated again and again in the history of Modernism.

Ah, it's OK...
I ended up buying this because I love the movie 'Withnail And I.' I purchased the 20th anniversary DVD of the film, featuring a commentary by Bruce Robinson (the director), who talks about his love of Baudelaire. It was on the basis of this that I bought the book.

Now, I love literature/poetry/drama (I have a degree in it), but having read this whole thing through very thoroughly, I'm afraid it just didn't engage me. Sorry Bruce, if you're out there.