Poetry Codex

French

Charles Baudelaire

1821–1867

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet, critic and translator of Edgar Allan Poe. Born in Paris, he spent his short life in the city's literary and artistic circles, and is widely regarded as a founder of modern poetry and a forerunner of the Symbolists.

His one major collection of verse, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), drew a prosecution for offending public morality, and six of its poems were suppressed. Its themes of spleen, beauty, desire, the city and death shaped later poets across Europe. These versions are from Cyril Scott's English translation of 1909.

Poems (54)

  1. Benediction
  2. Echoes
  3. The Sick Muse
  4. The Venal Muse
  5. The Evil Monk
  6. The Enemy
  7. Ill-Luck
  8. Interior Life
  9. Man and the Sea
  10. Beauty
  11. The Ideal
  12. The Giantess
  13. Hymn to Beauty
  14. Exotic Perfume
  15. La Chevelure
  16. Sonnet XXVIII
  17. Posthumous Remorse
  18. The Balcony
  19. The Possessed One
  20. Semper Eadem
  21. All Entire
  22. Sonnet XLIII
  23. The Living Torch
  24. The Spiritual Dawn
  25. Evening Harmony
  26. Overcast Sky
  27. Invitation to a Journey
  28. "Causerie"
  29. Autumn Song
  30. Sisina
  31. To a Creolean Lady
  32. Moesta et Errabunda
  33. The Ghost
  34. Autumn Song (They ask me—thy crystalline eyes)
  35. Sadness of the Moon-Goddess
  36. Cats
  37. Owls
  38. Music
  39. The Joyous Defunct
  40. The Broken Bell
  41. Spleen
  42. Obsession
  43. Magnetic Horror
  44. The Lid
  45. Bertha's Eyes
  46. The Set of the Romantic Sun
  47. Meditation
  48. To a Passer-by
  49. Illusionary Love
  50. Mists and Rains
  51. The Wine of Lovers
  52. Condemned Women
  53. The Death of the Lovers
  54. The Death of the Poor

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