Foreign Masters Series - Selected Essays of Baudelaire

Author: Baudelaire (French), translated by Huaiyu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: Baudelaire was a famous 19th-century French poet who shocked the French literary scene with his collection Les Fleurs du mal, marking a new chapter in the history of poetry and being hailed as a pioneer of Symbolist literature. This book collects some of Baudelaire's most important prose works in his lifetime, divided into four parts: "The Sorrow of Paris," "Wine and Indian Hemp," "The Artificial Paradise," and "Real Documents." In these works, Baudelaire confronts social reality with his unique (anti-traditional) aesthetic perspective and approach, portraying the distorted Parisian society of his time in a freer, more delicate, and more biting form and style than in Les Fleurs du mal. At the same time, he explores the spiritual worlds of those who, in an attempt to escape suffering, create their own paradise—The Artificial Paradise—through wine, Indian hemp, illusion, and decadence. Baudelaire's prose is beautiful, moving, and profound. It presents us with "an inner image, the naked image of a soul living in a big city, the naked image of a soul living in a big city." This book provides valuable material for prose enthusiasts and scholars to understand Baudelaire and recognize the sick and distorted human society of that time.