* Charles Baudelaire - Collected Poetry, Prose, and Letters (36 books)
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821–1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic and translator. He is credited with coining the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience. Baudelaire's great originality, Paul Verlaine wrote, was to "represent powerfully and essentially modern man" in all his physical, psychological, and moral complexity. He was a pivotal figure in European literature and thought, and his influence on modern poetry has been considerable.
His most famous work of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal [THE FLOWERS OF EVIL] (1857), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrializing Paris during the mid-19th century. It includes nearly all Baudelaire's lyric poetry, written from 1840 until his death in 1867, and was important in the symbolist — including painting — and modernist movements. Though extremely controversial upon its publication, with six of its poems censored due to their immorality, it is now considered a masterpiece of French poetry. The poems frequently break with tradition, using suggestive images and unusual forms. They deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism, particularly focusing on suffering and its relationship to original sin, disgust toward evil and oneself, obsession with death, and aspiration toward an ideal world. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, and, in the 20th century, Paul Valéry, Rainer Maria Rilke, and T.S. Eliot among many others.
As both poet and critic, Baudelaire stands in relation to French and European poetry as Gustave Flaubert and Édouard Manet do to fiction and painting, respectively: as a crucial link between Romanticism and modernism and as a supreme example, in both his life and his work, of what it means to be a modern artist. In his pursuit of an "evocative magic" of images and sounds, his blending of intellect and feeling, irony and lyricism, and his deliberate eschewal of rhetorical utterance, Baudelaire moved decisively away from the Romantic poetry of statement and emotion to the modern poetry of symbol and suggestion.
The following books are in ePub or PDF formats as indicated:
== POETRY ==
* Complete Poems [tr. Martin] (Carcanet, 2012) – ePub
* Collected Poetical Works (Delphi Classics, 2019) – ePub
* Flowers of Evil [ed. Mathews] (New Directions, 1955) – ePub
* Flowers of Evil [tr. McGowan] (Oxford, 1993) – ePub
* Flowers of Evil [tr. Poochigian] (Liveright, 2022) – ePub
* Flowers of Evil & Other Works [ed. Fowlie] (Dover, 1992) – ePub
* Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen: Selected Poems (Dover, 2010) – ePub
* The Language of Silent Things [tr. Barnard] (Quadrant, 1983) – PDF
* Les Fleurs du Mal [tr. Howard] (Godine, 1983) – PDF^
* Les Fleurs du Mal [tr. Tidball] (Bishopston, 2018) – ePub
* Œuvres Complètes [ed. Pynch] (2016) – ePub
* Paris Spleen [tr. Waldrop] (Wesleyan, 2009) – ePub + PDF
* Paris Spleen & La Fanfarlo [tr. Mackenzie] (Hackett, 2008) – PDF
* Paris Spleen, 1869 [tr. Varése] (New Directions, 1970) – ePub
* The Parisian Prowler [tr. Kaplan] (Georgia, 1989) – PDF * Poems [ed. Washington] (Everymans Library, 1993) – ePub
* Selected Poems [tr. Clark] (Penguin, 2004) – ePub
* Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal [tr. Owen] (Arc, 2015) – ePub
== FICTION ==
* Fanfarlo [tr. Kaplan] (Melville House, 2012) – ePub
* La Fanfarlo [tr. Boyd] (Donald S. Ellis, 1986) – PDF
== NON-FICTION ==
* Artificial Paradise [tr. Fox] (Herder & Herder, 1971) – PDF
* Artificial Paradises [tr. Diamond] (Citadel, 1996) – PDF
* Baudelaire on Poe: Critical Papers [ed. Hyslop] (Dover, 2014) – ePub
* The Essence of Laughter [ed. Quennell] (Meridian, 1956) – PDF
* Hashish, Wine, Opium [tr. Stang] (Alma Classics, 2009) – ePub
* My Heart Laid Bare [ed. Quennell] (Haskell House, 1975) – PDF^
* The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies [tr. Mayne] (Phaidon, 1955) – PDF^
* On Wine and Hashish [tr. Brown] (Heperus, 2002) – PDF^
* The Painter of Modern Life [tr. Charvet] (Penguin, 2010) – ePub
* The Painter of Modern Life [tr. Mayne] (Phaidon, 1970) – PDF
* Selected Writings on Art & Literature [tr. Charvet] (Penguin, 1992) – PDF^
== LETTERS & JOURNALS ==
* A Self-Portrait: Selected Letters [ed. Hyslop] (Oxford, 1957) – PDF^
* Intimate Journals (Hyperion, 1977) – PDF
* Letters from His Youth [tr. Morini & Tuten] (Doubleday, 1970) – PDF
* Letters to His Mother, 1833-1866 [tr. Symons] (Blom, 1971) – PDF
* Selected Letters [ed. Lloyd] (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986) – PDF^
