Biography

Carter, A. E. Charles Baudelaire. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977, 139 p.

Provides an account of Baudelaire's life and a critical overview of his poetry.

de Jonge, Alex. Baudelaire, Prince of Clouds: A Biography. New York: The Paddington Press Limited, 1976, 240 p.

Offers both an account of Baudelaire's life and a critical evaluation of his work. Excerpted in NCLC, Volume 29.

Hyslop, Lois Boe. Charles Baudelaire Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992, 180 p.

Examines the relationship between Baudelaire's life and his poetry.

Criticism

Auerbach, Erich. "The Aesthetic Dignity of 'Les fleurs du mal'." In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays, pp. 149-69. New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1959.

Discusses the influence on Baudelaire of the treatment of sexuality in the European literary tradition, particularly medieval Christian traditions of love. Excerpted in NCLC, Volume 6.

Balakian, Anna. "Those Stigmatized Poems of Baudelaire." The French Review, Vol. XXXI, No. 4 (February 1958): 273-7.

Considers Baudelaire's banned love poems, focusing on his treatment of lesbianism. Excerpted in NCLC, Volume 29.

Barlow, Norman H. Sainte-Beuve to Baudelaire: A Poetic Legacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1964, 226 p.

A scholarly study of Charles Sainte-Beuve's influence on Baudelaire's poetry.

Bataille, George. "A Perfect Silence of the Will." In Literature and Evil, translated by Alastair Hamilton, 1973. Reprinted in Charles Baudelaire, ed. Harold Bloom, pp. 11-25. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 1987.

Examines the complexities of Baudelaire's moral positions.

Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, translated by Harry Zohn. London: NLB, 1973, 79 p.

In a detailed explication of The Flowers of Evil, Benjamin examines its structure and content but focuses primarily on poetic vocabulary. His study is incorporated in a broad cultural analysis of nineteenth-century France during Baudelaire's lifetime.

Bishop, Lloyd. "The Coexistence of Contraries: Baudelaire's La Fanfarlo and Les Fleurs du mal." In Romantic Irony in French Literature from Diderot to Beckett, pp. 96-113. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989.

Observes that Baudelaire's poetry holds many contradictory positions simultaneously. Bishop argues that this is the primary reason for the wide influence that The Flowers of Evil has had on modern poetry.

Blood, Susan. "The Two Baudelaires: Valéry's Canonization of Les Fleurs du Mal." The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall 1993): 133-55.

Discusses the critical history of The Flowers of Evil and examines how the collection first received broad recognition.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Charles Baudelaire. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, 168 p.

Provides a collection of contemporary critical essays on Baudelaire.

Bonnefoy, Yves. "Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal." In The Act and Place of Poetry, pp. 44-9. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Discusses the relationship between death and language in The Flowers of Evil.

Brombert, Victor. "Baudelaire: City Images and the 'Dream of Stone'." Yale French Studies, No. 32 (1964): 99-105.

Discusses urban imagery in Baudelaire's poetry.

Burton, Richard D. E. Baudelaire in 1859: A Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 213 p.

Analyzes works that Baudelaire wrote in 1859, which the critic isolates as the most important and productive year of the poet's literary career.

Cargo, Robert T., ed. A Concordance to Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal." Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965, 417 p.

An alphabetical index of principal words in The Flowers of Evil.

Chadwick, Charles. "Baudelaire's 'Correspondences'." In Symbolism, pp. 8-16. New York: Methuen, 1971.

Discusses Baudelaire's influence on the French Symbolist movement.

Clements, Patricia. Baudelaire & the English Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, 442 p.

Traces the broad and varied influence of Baudelaire on English poets and critics.

Engstrom, Alfred Garvin. "Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and the Alchemy of 'Les fleurs du mal'." In Darkness and Light: Lectures on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Nerval, Huysmans, Racine, and Time and Its Images in Literature, pp. 11-34. University, MS: Romance Monographs, Inc., 1975.

Provides an overview of the poems in The Flowers of Evil. Excerpted in NCLC, Volume 29.

Fairlie, Alison. "Some Remarks on Baudelaire's 'Poème du haschisch'." In The French Mind: Studies in Honour of Gustave Rudler, edited by Will Moore, Rhoda Sutherland, and Enid Starkie, pp. 291-317. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952.

Argues that the thematic progression of Baudelaire's "Poème du haschisch" mirrors the arrangement of the poems in The Flowers of Evil.

Fowlie, Wallace. "Charles Baudelaire: The Experience of Religious Heroism." In Clowns and Angels: Studies in Modern French Literature, pp. 93-111. New York: Sheed and Ward, Inc., 1943.

Argues that The Flowers of Evil reflects Baudelaire's Christian faith. Fowlie states that Baudelaire proves the Roman Catholic dictum that it is "impossible to dispossess oneself of the spirit of Christianity." Excerpted in NCLC, Volume 6.

Gautier, Théophile. "Charles Baudelaire." In The Complete Works of Théophile Gautier, Vol. XII, edited and translated by F.C. DeSumichrast, pp. 17-126. New York: Bigelow and Smith & Co., 1903.

Examines the aesthetic goals of The Flowers of Evil. Gautier also argues that, though the collection's intention and execution are Romantic, Baudelaire is not to be confined to any literary school or movement. Excerpted in NCLC, Volume 6.

Johnston, John H. "Baudelaire." In The Poet and the City: A Study in Urban Perspectives, pp. 125-52. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.

Argues that the "Parisian Sketches" section of The Flowers of Evil represents a central expression of Baudelaire's worldview. Excerpted in NCLC, Volume 29.

Leakey, F. W. Baudelaire and Nature. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1969, 382 p.

Traces the evolution of Baudelaire's treatment of nature in both his poetry and his criticism.

——. Baudelaire: Collected Essays, 1953-1988, edited by Eva Jacobs. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 320 p.

Revised versions of many of the critic's principal essays on Baudelaire's work. Some of the essays are in French, with English summaries.

——. In Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Surveys some of the most important themes of The Flowers of Evil: Baudelaire's examination of himself, his ideas about the poetic process, his conception of morality, and his attitude toward nature.

Maclnnes, John W. The Comical as Textual Practice in Les Fleurs du Mal. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988, 150 p.

Contends that the duality of Baudelaire's poetry reflects a conflict between two different approaches to writing poetry.

Marder, Elissa. "Flat Death: Snapshots of History." Diacritics, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Fall-Winter 1992): 128-44.

Relates Baudelaire's poem "à un passante" to some modern analyses of death and mourning.

Mossop, D. J. Baudelaire's Tragic Hero: A Study of the Architecture of Les Fleurs du Mal. London: Oxford University Press, 1961, 254 p.

Searches for the "secret architecture" of The Flowers of Evil.

Peyre, Henri. "'Correspondances' and 'Spleen'." In The Poem Itself, edited by Stanley Burnshaw, pp. 8-19. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.

Provides translations and line-by-line analyses of two of Baudelaire's most important poems, 'Correspondences' and 'Spleen'." Excerpted in NCLC, Volume 29.

——. Baudelaire: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962, 184 p.

Provides a selection of twentieth-century critical essays on Baudelaire.

——. "Baudelaire as a Love Poet." In Baudelaire as a Love Poet and Other Essays, edited by Lois Boe Hyslop, pp. 3-39. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969.

Examines the "sensual, the sentimental, and the cerebral" aspects of Baudelaire's love poetry.

Sainte-Beuve, Charles. "Baudelaire." In Sainte-Beuve: Selected Essays, translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller and Norbert Guterman, pp. 275-9. London: Methuen and Co., 1963.

This translation of an 1863 article provides the only critical commentary on Baudelaire by Sainte-Beuve that is available in English. Sainte-Beuve seems to have resented Baudelaire's talent. Here, he begrudgingly acknowledges the younger poet's creative abilities.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Baudelaire, translated by Martin Turnell. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1950, 192 p.

Examines Baudelaire in relation to the social conditions under which The Flowers of Evil was written. Excerpted in NCLC, Volume 6.

Sieburth, Richard. "Poetry and Obscenity: Baudelaire and Swinburne." Comparative Literature, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Fall 1984): 343-53.

Compares the charges of obscenity leveled in France against The Flowers of Evil with the outcry against Swinburne's Poems and Ballads in England in 1866.

Valéry, Paul. "The Position of Baudelaire." In Variety, translated by William Aspenwall Bradley, pp. 71-100. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1938.

Recognizes the juxtaposition of Romantic and classical elements in Baudelaire's poetry and argues that The Flowers of Evil is the most important work in the history of French literature. Excerpted in NCLC, Volume 6.

Wing, Nathaniel. "The Danaide's Vessel: On Reading Baudelaire's Allegories." In The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, pp. 8-18. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986

Examines the function of allegory in The Flowers of Evil.

Additional coverage of Baudelaire's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale Research: Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Volume 6 and Volume 29.