Cats (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Charles Baudelaire
- First Published: 1847
- Type of Work: Sonnet
- Genres: Poetry, Sonnet
- Subjects: Magic or magicians, Love or romance, Cats, Romanticism, Animals, Alchemy
The Poem
“Cats” is a sonnet, a poem of fourteen lines, in which the octave is divided into two quatrains and the sestet is made up of two tercets. The poem was first published in the journal Le Corsaire in 1847 and was ultimately included in Charles Baudelaire’s collection of 1857 known in English as The Flowers of Evil. The poem is both elegant and magical in its descriptions of cats. The first line (in the translation by Anthony Hecht) introduces “Feverish lovers, scholars in their lofts,” and the second line states that both lovers and scholars will...
[The entire page is 1380 words long]
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