Baudelaire and 'Le Spleen de Paris'

The collection of prose poems known as Le Spleen de Paris is an important, puzzling and yet relatively neglected area of Baudelaire's work. This book attempts to cast light on the uncertainty that surrounds all aspects of these texts. Emphasizing the importance of approaching them chronologically, it focuses principally on the position of the artist and his attitude towards his art, the often enigmatic and contradictory moral message the poems purport to convey, and above all on the relationship between prose and poetry in this hybrid and, by the poet's own admission, `dangerous' genre. This is the first study in English that is exclusively concerned with Le Spleen de Paris.