Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city and its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortality, and the liberation provided by the sensual delights of intoxication, art, and women. Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry—a format which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux, and freedom of his age—and one of the founding texts of literary modernism.
- ISBN10 0811200078
- ISBN13 9780811200073
- Publish Date 1 February 1970 (first published 17 January 1970)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Format Paperback
- Pages 118
- Language English