Complete Poems

Rimbaud called him “le premier voyant, roi des poetes, un vrai dieu,” and the history of modern poetry, which begins with him, has bourn out that opinion. This is a comprehensive new translation of all of Baudelaire’s poetry, excluding only the juvenilia, occasional verse and work of doubtful attribution. Baudelaire contemplated a volume of poems that would “launch him into the future like a cannonball,” and here it is in vivid and formally authoritative translation.