Charles Baudelaire: Paris Blues (Anvil Editions)

Le Spleen de Paris, also known as Paris Spleen or Petits Poèmes en prose, is a collection of 50 short prose poems by Charles Baudelaire. The collection was published posthumously in 1869 and is associated with literary modernism. Baudelaire mentions he had read Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la nuit (considered the first example of prose poetry) at least twenty times before starting this work. Though inspired by Bertrand, Baudelaire's prose poems were based on Parisian contemporary life instead of the medieval background which Bertrand employed. He said of his work: "These are the flowers of evil again, but with more freedom, much more detail, and much more mockery." Indeed, many of the themes and even titles from Baudelaire's earlier collection Les Fleurs du mal are revisited in this work. These poems have no particular order, have no beginning and no end, and can be read like thoughts or short stories in a stream of consciousness style. The point of the poems is "to capture the beauty of life in the modern city," using what Jean-Paul Sartre has labeled his existential outlook on his surroundings. Published twenty years after the fratricidal June Days that ended the ideal or "brotherly" revolution of 1848, Baudelaire makes no attempts at trying to reform society he has grown up in but realizes the inequities of the progressing modernization of Paris. In poems such as "The Eyes of the Poor" where he writes (after witnessing an impoverished family looking in on a new cafe): "Not only was I moved by that family of eyes, but I felt a little ashamed of our glasses and decanters, larger than our thirst ...", showing his feelings of despair and class guilt. The title of the work refers not to the abdominal organ (the spleen) but rather to the second, more literary meaning of the word, "melancholy with no apparent cause, characterised by a disgust with everything".