LITMIR.BIZ

      This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

      TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

      Baudelaire, in his last years, planned a new (“augmented”) edition of The Flowers of Evil and, as “pendant” to that work, a volume of “little poems in prose.” He did not live to see fulfilled either of these projects. The third edition of The Flowers of Evil came out the year after his death, as volume one of Complete Works; a year later (1869) volume four of this posthumous omnibus included the prose poems. For neither collection had Baudelaire left very precise instructions (in spite of various lists) and the contents for both were arranged by the editors.

      In 1863 he had written the publisher Hetzel (most famous now for the big red hardbacks of Jules Verne) that Paris Spleen would contain a hundred poems — of which he was still, he said, thirty short. In his remains were found only the fifty offered here.

      He had published prose poems as early as 1855 (two years before the first — condemned — edition of The Flowers of Evil), so the book was not a sudden new idea. In a rare case he had rewritten a prose poem in verse; more often (but not really often) redone a verse poem into prose. Some poets write drafts in prose, then work them into verse. This was not Baudelaire’s practice.

      POETRY, PROSE, VERSE

      ‘Prose’ in the phrase ‘prose and poetry’ has not the same meaning as ‘prose’ when opposed to ‘verse.’ We have in English, as Eliot noted decades ago, three words: prose, poetry, and verse — where we need four. The culprit is ‘prose.’ The same problem exists in French.

      To distinguish prose from verse is easy: The basic element of prose is the sentence; that of verse, the line.

      Baudelaire had no reason to question that he was writing poetry, for which I am not about to hazard a definition. After all, The Flowers of Evil was known to be a book of poems (its morality was argued, never its genre), and Paris Spleen he intended not to break with, but to continue, that work. The change from earlier to later was not poetry-to-prose but specifically verse-to-prose.

      THE TITLE

      The title adopted for the posthumous

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