Paris Spleen

Paris Spleen is one of the first modern books—formally experimental, morally ambivalent, and relentlessly urban. Written in the 1850s, these fifty prose poems roam through the streets of Paris with unsparing detail and a deeply ambivalent gaze. Baudelaire captures daily life as something both intoxicating and absurd, filled with strange encounters, sudden violence, fleeting beauty, and constant noise.

This is not poetry in the usual sense, but something sharper and more elastic: compact narr...