At the time of its release in 1860, Charles Baudelaire's "Artificial Paradises (Les Paradis Artificiels)" met with immediate praise. One of the most important French symbolists, Baudelaire led a debauched, violent, and ultimately tragic life, dying an opium addict in 1867. This book, a response to Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, serves as a memoir of Baudelaire's last years.

In this beautifully wrought portrait of the effects of wine, opium, and hashish on the mind, Baudelaire captures the dreamlike visions he experienced during his narcotic trances. These...

Among the earliest artistic accounts of the hallucinogenic experience in European literature, the four pieces in this volume document Gautier and Baudelaire s own involvement in the Club of Assassins, who met under the auspices of Dr Moreau to investigate the psychological and mind-enhancing effects of hashish, wine, and opium. As well as providing an absorbing of nineteenth-century drug use, Hashish, Wine, Opium captures the spirit of French Romanticism, in its struggle to free the mind from the shackles of the humdrum and the conventional, and serves as a fascinating prologue to the...

'I have sought forgetful sleep in love; but love is nothing but a mattress of needles'

The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories and poorhouses. In love poems such as 'Le Beau Navire', flights of lyricism entwine with languorous eroticism, while prose poems such as 'La Chambre Double' deal with the agonies of artistic creation...

The Flowers of Evil, which T.S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking of sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. Including the French texts and comprehensive explanatory notes to the poems, this extraordinary body of love poems restores the six poems originally banned in 1857, revealing the richness and variety of the collection.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford...

Including all poems published in the previous three editions, this comprehensive new translation of Baudelaire's poetry is both vivid and authoritative. This dual-language volume presents both the original French poems as well as their translations.

The poems of The Flowers of Evil were written in Paris at a time of revolution and accelerating change - the beginning of mass culture, the rise of consumerism and the middle-class, the radical redevelopment of the city by Haussmann - and they provide many parallels with the malaise and uncertainties of contemporary capitalist societies. Jan Owen's masterly translation captures all of this in a selection that includes many of Baudelaire's best known poems - including those banned from 1857 edition - as well as some less familiar ones, with the volume leading up to his great long poem, 'The...

This fully revised and amended edition of Baudelaire's masterpiece of lyric poetry contains all of the poems from all three editions of Les Fleurs du Mal, with both the original French texts and new English verse translations on the facing page. The translations preserve both the original versification and the intrinsic sense of each individual poem.

Esta recopilacion compuesta de ineditos y piezas condenadas fue publicada en Bruselas, bajo el cuidado de Poulet-Malassis, amigo de Baudelaire con un pie de imprenta apocrifo: Amsterdam, a l'Enseigne du Coq, precedida por un simbolico frontispicio de Felicien Rops."