Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernist poetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire's World provides English-language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts that will lead to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of the great French poet's work.
Rosemary Lloyd considers all of Baudelaire's writing, including his criticism, theory, and letters, as well as poetry. In doing so, she sets the poems themselves in a richer context, in a landscape of real places populated with actual people. She shows how Baudelaire's poetry was marked by the influence of the writers and artists who preceded him or were his contemporaries. Lloyd builds an image of Baudelaire's world around major themes of his writing—childhood, women, reading, the city, dreams, art, nature, death. Throughout, she finds that his words and themes echo the historical and physical realities of life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.
Lloyd also explores the possibilities and limitations of translation. As an integral part of her treatment of the life, poetry, and letters of her subject, she also reflects on published translations of Baudelaire's work and offers some of her own translations.
Rosemary Lloyd is Rudy Professor of French and Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Indiana University-Bloomington. She is the author, editor, and translator of several books, including Shimmering in a Transformed Light: Writing the Still Life, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle, and Closer and Closer Apart: Jealousy in Literature, all from Cornell.
What People are Saying About This
Sonya Stephens
Baudelaire's World brings into sharp focus the cultural context, thematic concerns, formal challenges, artistic debates, and biographical details necessary to unlock the complexities of this important nineteenth-century figure. Rosemary Lloyd invites us to embark on a journey which is, at least in part, an exploration of reading. Through engaging discussion and close analysis of key poems and comparative translations, she works out the condensation of themes that defines Baudelaire's writing. Lloyd's meticulous scholarship and acute understanding of Baudelaire, and especially of Baudelaire in English translation, make the complete range of his works (poetry, criticism, journals, correspondence) accessible to the Anglophone reader.
Dorothy M. Betz
Baudelaire would have liked this book. As Rosemary Lloyd takes up a range of topics that fuse into a reading of Baudelaire's text, her book adopts a pattern not unlike the fusion of images in the poetry. Returning motifs, especially the recurring use of 'Le Cygne,' tie the thematic chapters together and give the reader a pleasant sense of familiarity.
Mary Ann Caws
Rosemary Lloyd's superb new interpretation and retranslation of Baudelaire and his world will astonish only those who are not acquainted with her previous work on Baudelaire and Mallarmé. With her elegant expression and highly active intelligence, her unfailing sense of rhythm and tone in reading and in translation, and her sure and extended knowledge of the poet's background and poems, she manages to create a new domain where writer, reader, and critic can find a common and uncommon joy.
