Paris Spleen is one of the first modern books—formally experimental, morally ambivalent, and relentlessly urban.
2nd September 2025
Hardcover
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Summary
Paris Spleen is one of the first modern books—formally experimental, morally ambivalent, and relentlessly urban.
Description
Paris Spleen is one of the first modern books—formally experimental, morally ambivalent, and relentlessly urban. Written in the 1850s, these fifty prose poems roam through the streets of Paris with unsparing detail and a deeply ambivalent gaze. Baudelaire captures daily life as something both intoxicating and absurd, filled with strange encounters, sudden violence, fleeting beauty, and constant noise.
This is not poetry in the usual sense, but something sharper and more elastic: compact narratives, snapshots, observations, and provocations.Baudelaire moves quickly between tones—satirical, melancholic, brutal, philosophical—without ever losing control. Paris Spleen speaks in the voice of a man both of the city and estranged from it, and it remains one of the most influential works of the 19th century: vivid, darkly comic, and permanently contemporary.
Critic Reviews
What is great and strange about Baudelaire’s poetry [is] its unmatched capacity to transmute public existence into private torments and then return them to the public sphere. -- Joshua Clover The Nation
About the Author
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet, essayist, and cultural critic whose work reshaped modern literature.
His landmark collection, The Flowers of Evil, brought a new intensity to poetic language—introspective, decadent, and defiant. Restless and often at odds with his time, Baudelaire was among the first writers to take the modern city as his true subject, and remains one of its most enduring interpreters.
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2nd September 2025
