front cover of Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Rosemary Lloyd
Reaktion Books, 2008
In nineteenth-century Paris, Charles Baudelaire provoked the excoriations of critics and was legally banned for corrupting public morality, yet he was a key influence on many later thinkers and writers, including Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin, and T. S. Eliot. Baudelaire’s life was as controversial and vivid as his works, as Rosemary Lloyd reveals in Charles Baudelaire, a succinct yet learned recounting.

            Lloyd argues that Baudelaire’s writings and life were intimately intertwined—and both were powerfully informed by contemporaneous political events, from his participation in the 1848 Revolution to the public morality codes that banned his controversial writings, such as Les fleurs du mal. The book traces the influence of these events and other political moments in his poems and essays and analyzes his works in this new light. Lloyd also examines the links between Baudelaire’s works and cultural movements of the time, from the rise and fall of Romanticism to symbolism, and explores his groundbreaking translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s writings into French.

Baudelaire’s tumultuous personal life figures large here, too, as Lloyd draws out fascinating aspects of his personality and daily life through analysis of archival writings of his friends and acquaintances. The book also documents his battles with syphilis and drug addiction, which ultimately resulted in his death. An engrossing and wholly readable biography, Charles Baudelaire will be essential for scholars and Baudelaire admirers alike.
 
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front cover of Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire
Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire
The Conquest of Solitude
Charles Baudelaire
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Undeniably one of the modern world's greatest literary figures, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) left behind a correspondence documenting in intimate detail a life as intense in its extremes as his poetry. This extensive selection of his letters—many translated for the first time into English—depicts a poet divided between despair and elation, thoughts of suicide and intimations of immortality; a man who could write to his mother, "We're obviously destined to love one another, to end our lives as honestly and gently as possible," and say in the next sentence, "I'm convinced that one of us will kill the other"; who courted and then suffered the controversy provoked by his masterpiece, Les Fleurs du mal; who struggled throughout his life with syphilis contracted in his youth, near-intolerable financial restrictions imposed by his stepfather, and conflicting feelings of failure and revolt dating from his school days.

Writing to family, friends, and lovers, Baudelaire reveals the incidents and passions that went into his poetry. In letters to editors, idols, and peers—Hugo, Flaubert, Vigny, Wagner, Cladel, among others—he elucidates the methods and concerns of his own art and criticism and comments tellingly on the arts and politics of his day. In all, ranging from childhood to days shortly before his death, these letters comprise a complex and moving portrait of the quintessential poet and his time.
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Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
University of Chicago Press, 1988
It is the reading world's good fortune that Stéphane Mallarmé's letters survived, allowing later generations an intimate look at the inner life of one of Europe's most important poets. Mallarmé (1842-98), often called the father of the Symbolists, has had an immense influence on the development of modern European poetry. It was his ambition to create a poetry pure of quotidian reality—autonomous, concentrated, linguistically inventive. His correspondence documents the evolution of this aim, the crafting of a poetics out of a life inescapably "real" in its pains and charms.
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