Customer Reviews

Paris Spleen (New Directions Paperbook)

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The book that helped me overcome my prejudice against poetry--I carried "Paris Spleen" around with me for a couple of weeks after I first read it, and kept turning back to certain poems as I went about my daily errands. Even though it's nearly 150 years old it seems as timely and contemporary as it must have seemed when it was first published--absolutely top-notch.

This is a wonderful book -- Baudelaire's prose poems perfectly capture the spirit of 19th century Paris as it rushes into modernism. Don't be seduced by prettier editions of this book -- it is crucial to get the Varese translation! Also, Walter Benjamin's early to mid twentieth century critique of Baudelarie should not be missed.

An elegant, accurate, and readable translation of this wonderful little book that can revolutionize your way of seeing and thinking. Some newer, and in some ways, better translations have appeared since this one became the "standard," but it's still a good buy and a sure bet for reading pleasure.

great.....witty...often times very beautiful descriptions of love...smashing into reality....makes you let go of hatred and stand back and chuckle...at the way things are

Yes, Baudelaire, himself told to his friend Troubat:"These are The flowers of evil again, but with more freedom,much more detailes, and much more mockery". Noone before Baudelaire has ever concepted the poem in prose which would express so many special, original and protesting sensations. This urban, very personal poetry is a product of the metropolitan noisy atmosphere, and as it is surrounded with fog of overpopulated, but yet unexplored areas.This poetry expresses more than the actual meaning of the words is telling.Spleen is created of prose and pure poetry, of the reflection of the analytical spirit and intuitive introspection.The apostle of pain and depression,Baudelaire is the one who analyzes his own and other people's sins, expresses himself as a moralist in this book as well.

I used this book my freshmen year of college in an English class. It was very interesting and insightful. Although the read is very hard to understand because of the language, if your are able to take the time to really think about the messages and look up the meanings of the really hard ones, you will find that it makes a lot of sense. I liked and thought it made me step out of my normal realm of thinking.

Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen is a wonderfully original work, one happily outside the framework of American literature and its broad range of sensibilities. Most notably, these 51 short prose poems illustrate how truth, and the most accurate perceptions of life possible, can be reached purely by honing the senses and then melding them with the more passive facilities of the mind; logic and rational thinking, as demonstrated here, are for the vulgar, those in denial, those simply unable to accept the very rich, very broad, self-evident smorgasbord of life. Baudelaire, both a tragic and a comedic clown, also effortlessly illustrates how melancholy and joy are by no means mutually exclusive categories of human feeling and experience.

Set largely against autumnal landscapes, the wandering poet indulges in "the mysterious and aristocratic pleasure of watching" whenever he is not a direct participant in the events these visionary pieces describe. Solitary, "fluent in outrage," cranky, self-tormented, lovelorn, misanthropic, and pedagogical by turns, these pieces find the poet stalking bereaved widows, peering unseen through the candle-lit windows of neighbor's homes, asking philosophical questions of "enigmatical" strangers, shunning crowds, luxuriating in midnight solitude, greeting the twilight with a bow, reading the time of day in a cat's eyes, "beating the poor," and listening, eavesdropping, and relentlessly observing wherever he goes.

Not surprisingly, the poet's vision of urban Paris lies somewhere between the canvases of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec; garishly colored, slightly grotesque, heavily populated with heavy, heaving women and friable grande dames, Baudelaire's city is a fluid stage for life's pantomime, open to and allowing for all combinations and possibilities. By contrast, his autumnal countryside is a place of relative purity, where the poet wanders alone under piercing blue skies and roaming, shadow-casting clouds.

In one of the more hallucinatory episodes, the poet, "under a vast gray sky, on a vast and dusty plain" comes upon a procession of men with "worn and serious faces," each of whom carries a very large, monstrous "chimera" on his back, the muscles, tendons and limbs of the beasts wrapped tightly around them. None the wiser after asking these men his litany of inevitable questions, the poet observes that "under the depressing dome of the sky" the men moved past and beyond him, each "with the resigned look of men who are condemned to hope forever."

Paris Spleen is a wise, serious, and often dour work. But if its only occasionally tragic underpinnings and conclusions can be embraced by its audience, then its vibrant, bawdy, colorful, and transcendent aspect reveals itself shamelessly in turn. Baudelaire is so confident, unselfconscious, and plain-spoken that his perceptions are remarkably easy to visualize, his emotions as expressed surprisingly easy to relate to. Few books are as multi-prismed as this.

The poet implies that if man could accept mortality, reasonably subdue his ego, and curb his more flagrant dreams, life would begin to resemble the far from perfect, but certainly tolerable and potentially enjoyable, miracle that it actually is. The poet seems to have reached the same conclusion that Isak Dinsen did at the end of her memoir, `Out Of Africa' (1937): man must accept, without exclusion, every facet, aspect, element, and component of existence before existence--before life--will give anything back to him.

In no way despairing, Paris Spleen is a pleasure to contemplate, discuss, laugh over, and digest. Readers may carry their copy in their back pocket until it falls into tatters, and force copies on friends [that's you, Iris], family, and strangers. Beautifully translated by Louise Varese. Highly recommended, especially to the non-creative who would like to see, however briefly, as a poet sees.