Book Description
A full translation of Petits Poèmes en Prose in its first revised edition, illustrated with eight previously unpublished drawings by Crowley and a frontispiece of Baudelaire by Henri Matisse. It has been edited with a foreword by Martin P. Starr, and incorporates Crowley's annotations and revisions. This new edition is hardbound and printed on acid-free paper
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Author
No bolder task can possibly be undertaken than the translation of prose so musical, so subtle, so profound as that of Charles Baudelaire. For this task I have but the one qualification of a love so overmastering, so absorbing, that in spite of myself it claims for me a brotherhood with him.
Charles Baudelaire is incomparably the most divine, the most spiritually-minded, of all French thinkers. His hunger for the Infinite was so acute and so persistent that nothing earthly could content him even for a moment. He even made the mistake—if it be, after all, such a mistake!—of feeding on poison because he recognized the banality of food; of experimenting with death because he had tried life, and found it fail him. The thought of Baudelaire has thus been universally recognized as highly unsuitable for the suburbs, as incompatible with any view of life which advocates spiritual complacency, mental and physical contentment. His writings are indeed the deadliest poison for the idle, the optimistic, the overfed: they must fill every really human spirit with that intense and insufferable yearning which drives it forth into the wilderness, whence it can only return charioted by the horses of Apollo and the lions of Demeter, or where it must for ever wander tortured and cast out, uttering ever the hyaena cry of madness, and making its rare meal upon the carrion of the damned.-Aleister Crowley
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
