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Charles BAUDELAIRE

[Le Spleen de Paris] Petits poëmes en prose - Les Paradis artificiels

Michel Lévy frères, Paris 1869, 12,5x18,8cm, broché sous coffret.

| Only Deluxe Copy Still in Wrappers |
 

“Who among us has not, in his days of ambition, dreamed the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple and agile enough to adapt to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of daydreams, to the leaps of consciousness?” (A Arsène Houssaye, p. 2).

[Little Poems in Prose – Artificial Paradises]
Michel Lévy frères ◇ Paris 1869 ◇ 12,5 x 18,8 cm ◇ original wrappers under clamshell box

First edition of Baudelaire's prose po­ems (Petits poëmes en prose) later published by the better-known title Le Spleen de Paris. One of the very rare copies printed on hollande, only de­luxe issue (grands papiers). A very slight restoration to the margin of the first cover.
With a preface to the collection by the author, derived from a letter to Arsène Houssaye, explaining his ambitions for the prose poems. The poems are fol­lowed in this volume by the second edi­tion of Paradis Artificiels.
This edition was used as the fourth vol­ume of Baudelaire's complete works, as stated “OEuvres complètes” on the cov­er. It was also sold separately, given the several years it took to publish all seven volumes of the complete works.
Our copy is housed in a custom clam­shell box with the design of the orig­inal cover and spine, signed by Julie Nadot.
Extremely rare copy printed on hol­lande, the only deluxe issue: less than ten copies are said to have been print­ed. The only copy still in wrappers, as issued, we have been able to trace.
A keystone to the canon of the mod­ernist literary movement, Baudelaire's prose poems are considered one of the earliest and most successful examples of a specifically urban writing, a close equivalent of Impressionist city scenes. They had a far-reaching effect on sub­sequent poetry, leading to Rimbaud's Illuminations, Lautréamont's Songs of Maldoror, Huysmans' Dish of Spices – as Cheryl Krueger notes, “Le Spleen de Paris changed the course of poetry be­yond France as well, paving the way for future writers of the prose poem genre: Jorge Luis Borges, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kaf­ka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Walt Whitman, and Gertrude Stein, to name only a few”. The fifty poems were posthumously col­lected in this 1869 first edition, and five of them appearing in print for the very first time. As chaotic in appearance as The Flowers of Evil were architectur­ally organized, this first edition takes up Baudelaire's original assemblage. He himself saw his prose poems as a counterpart to his Flowers, “although with much more freedom, detail and mockery” (letter to Jules Troubat, 16 February 1866). This connection is fur­ther established by the presence of key verse-prose doublets within the two collections, such as “La Chevelure” and
“Un hémisphère dans une chevelure.” The poet thus makes a definitive turn towards a modern poetry that revels in its own contradictions, “containing multitudes” in the words of Walt Whit­man, another great painter of modern life. Baudelaire was the first to openly define his writings as “prose poems”, uniting two terms so starkly opposed that each qualifies as itself by not be­ing the other – thus collapsing one of the most important semantic barriers shrouding the genre of poetry.
We are able to trace just four copies on hollande, all bound:
◇ The Charles Asselineau copy (bound by Capé, Masson-Debonnelle) in the Jacques Doucet library, Paris
◇ A copy from the Noilly, Hayoit and Pierre Leroy libraries (bound by Cham­bolle-Duru)
◇ A green half morocco (Porquet sale, 1888)
◇ A red half morocco (Teschener sale, 1891)
A true bibliophilic rarity, containing the radical productions of a cursed poet who invited prose into his poetry after mastering verse.
Vicaire, I, 350.



 

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