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Audiobook editionPaperback · 6 × 9 in · 132 pagesHardcover · 6 × 9 in · 132 pagesAbout this book
What if beauty waits in the crowd, beside a dead animal, or behind a stranger’s passing face?
Charles Baudelaire turns Paris into poetry: its perfume and crowds, its passing strangers, its boredom and desire. This collection brings together Les Fleurs du mal, or The Flowers of Evil, and Paris Spleen, also called Little Poems in Prose. Verse and short prose scenes give shape to the ache beneath city life.
In Spleen and Ideal, longing pulls against despair. Parisian Scenes brings the streets into focus, while other sections explore wine, vice, rebellion and death. Paris Spleen carries these concerns into brief prose pieces. Across both works, Baudelaire seeks poetry that belongs to a city being torn down and rebuilt, rather than to old myths.
What you’ll discover
- Beauty beside decay Encounter perfume and a dead animal on a path within the same searching poetic world.
- Longing against despair Explore the pull between spleen and ideal, where desire meets an ache that persists.
- Faces in the street Notice a passing stranger and an old woman in a doorway as subjects for poetry.
- Music within strict form Hear regular stanzas, rhymes and sonnets give shape to love, lust, boredom and death.
- Poetry beyond verse Discover how Paris Spleen makes short prose scenes carry the weight of city life.
Who will love it
You will love this if you enjoy vivid images, perfume and music, city walks at dusk, dark romance, and a poet who looks straight at beauty, desire and mortality.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Beauty grows where sorrow lives
- Beauty cannot return the poet's love
- The senses open hidden worlds
- Spleen turns pleasure into a prison
- Desire carries the shadow of death
- The city leaves people behind
- Escape promises a world beyond time
- Everyday speech carries dreams and irony
- Small images can hold whole lives
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The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire
A swan walks dry Paris pavement, a skeleton dances in a ballroom, and a poet begs you to be drunk.
ChallengingUnder 2 hours to read20 languages
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“You must always be drunk: that is the only thing that matters.”
In short
What happens when a skeleton walks into a ballroom, carrying flowers and wearing gloves? In the first poem of this book, the guests stare, the violins play on, and the poet admits that he loves her bare bones.
The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire at a glance
- Reading time
- About 1 h 55 min1 h 30 min fast, 2 h 15 min slow
- Length
- 26,800 words
- Library level
- Challenging long sentences, a rich vocabulary
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Baudelaire finds beauty where others see decay
Baudelaire builds his poems on one bold claim. Beauty is not kept for gardens and sunsets. It lives in graveyards, in hospitals and in dirty streets, and the poet's task is to find it there. This is why he names his book The Flowers of Evil, as if sin and sorrow could be made to bloom.
The opening poems show the method. In The Dance of Death, a skeleton wears a wreath of flowers on her skull and a bright shoe on her dry foot. The people who laugh at her, he says, are drawn only to flesh and blood, and they cannot see the nameless grace of the bone.
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A swan walks dry Paris pavement, a skeleton dances in a ballroom, and a poet begs you to be drunk.
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Details
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 2 h 5 min
- Level
- Challenging
- Paperback
- 132 pages · 6 × 9 in
- Hardcover
- 132 pages · 6 × 9 in
- Large print paperback
- 172 pages · 6 × 9 in
- Large print hardcover
- 172 pages · 6 × 9 in
- Delivery and returns
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Cite this edition
Baudelaire, Charles. The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-poems-and-prose-poems-of-charles-baudelaire.
Baudelaire, C. (2026). The poems and prose poems of Charles Baudelaire. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-poems-and-prose-poems-of-charles-baudelaire
Baudelaire, Charles. The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-poems-and-prose-poems-of-charles-baudelaire.
@book{baudelaire2026poems,
author = {Baudelaire, Charles},
title = {The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-poems-and-prose-poems-of-charles-baudelaire}
}
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What is The Flowers of Evil about?
It is Baudelaire's collection of poems about beauty, desire, boredom, remorse, death and the city of Paris. Its title suggests that even sin and sorrow can be made into art, and the poems keep testing that idea.
What are the prose poems of Baudelaire?
They are short pieces written in paragraphs instead of rhymed lines, gathered as Little Poems in Prose. They capture city life, dreams and parables with the same imagery and mood as his verse, in a freer and more conversational rhythm.
What does spleen mean in Baudelaire?
Spleen is Baudelaire's word for a deep gloom and boredom that no pleasure can lift. In the poem Spleen, a rich young king sits among dogs and jesters and cannot smile, a picture of that mood.
The author
Charles Baudelaire
1821–1867 · French poet and critic
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet and critic whose collection The Flowers of Evil scandalized Second Empire Paris and reshaped modern poetry. His verse on beauty, decay, and city life made him a founding voice of literary modernism.
“You must always be drunk: that is the only thing that matters.”
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