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Rating: 
Summary: poets of evil
Review: I think I have a better instinctual understand of these "decadents" who were the clear marking of the break between the old aesthetic rationality and the surrealism, symbolism, etc. that followed--those who actually blend the periods, smudge and blur the two worldviews, like Poe and Blake and, here, Baudelaire do. I like Baudelaire's phantasmagoria, his exoticism put in service of delivering a concrete insight. And I especially like it when the poetic histrionics of "Flowers of Evil" give way to the fascinating prose poems--like "The Confiteor of the Artist" or the marvellous war-against-poetry volley "The Courteous Marksman." Other fine ones (reminding me also of Lovecraft)--"The Evil Glazier," "At One O'Clock in the Morning," "Solitude." There's misanthropy, insight and occult broodishness here of the most useful sort. Rimbaud and Verlaine didn't grip me as strongly--I appreciate that they stretched artistic boundaries, but what they have done intrinsically I don't find as rich. Rimbaud's religious ravings and visions I find intelligent but obscurant (like Wallace Stevens)--he's doing some constructive deconstruction, but it's hardly readable (though I do like the more coherent symbolism of the famed "Drunken Boat"). And Verlaine, while he has the occasional dead-on whimsical insight, is a bit too florid in verbiage, classical in form, and even conventional for me. With these latter two poets, I think my concern with translated poetry also must come in at full force--this sort of wordplay and deliberate suggestiveness must be highly dependent on the nuance of the original words, and must therefore lose something considerable in English.--J.Ruch
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