Little Poems in Prose

1928

Special Collections PQ2191 S63 A23 1928

Paris: Edward W. Titus/Black Manikin Press

The prose poems that form Charles Pierre Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (or Petits Poèmes en prose) were written as a ‘pendant’, a completion of his more famous Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), published in 1857. Published posthumously in 1869, they intended to capture ‘the beauty of life in the modern city’ with subjects urban: an old woman; a dog; windows, mistresses; poor people hanging around eateries. In his preface to this limited edition, Aleister Crowley, the translator, calls Baudelaire (1821–1867) ‘the most divine, the most spiritually minded, of all French thinkers.’ Baudelaire’s ‘modernity’ influenced a whole generation of writers: Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé; he remains an important French poet.