Synopsis: '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 and mortality. With their startling combination of harsh reality and sublime beauty, formal ingenuity and revolutionary poetic language, these poems, including a generous selection from Les Fleurs du Mal, show Baudelaire as one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. From the Back Cover: Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) has proved to be the most influential of French nineteenth-century poets for the way in which his writing combines strong emotion, acute aesthetic sensibility and formal perfection with the everyday settings and language of the modern city. This volume contains 102 poems, including ninety-two from the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal and nine from the Petits Poemes en Prose together with plain prose translations by Carol Clark.