Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire expanded the possibilities of French lyric and prose poetry through sharply observed writing on modern Paris, beauty and alienation. His prose poems, published posthumously as Le Spleen de Paris, appear in Poems in Prose through Arthur Symons’s English translation. J. C. Squire translated twelve Baudelaire poems for “Twelve Translations from Charles Baudelaire,” a section of Squire’s collection The Three Hills, And Other Poems. Baudelaire also worked as an art critic and translated Edgar Allan Poe into French, activities that connected his poetry to wider debates about modern art and literature. Les Fleurs du mal remains his best-known verse collection, while the shorter prose pieces helped establish the prose poem as a major modern form.