Biography

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, born in Paris in 1821, was one of the greatest nineteenth-century French poets. He was a key figure in European literature, with a far-reaching influence — an example, in his life and in his poetry, of what it means to be modern.

Les Fleurs du Mal, his major work, was influenced by the French romantic poets of the early nineteenth century; it is formally close to the contemporary Parnassians, but is psychologically and sexually complex. Baudelaire’s is a poetic of the imagination, blending irony and lyricism, intellect and feeling. He had an urban sensibility and was a flâneur and dandy, an admirer of the artificial as opposed to the natural; his fascination with horror, sexual perversity, death and decay is balanced by a sensitivity to beauty and suffering which invests many of his poems with a subversive spirituality.

Much of the literary world of the time was outraged by his work, and he and his publisher and printer were successfully prosecuted for obscenity, with six of the poems being suppressed in France until 1949. Baudelaire was also a highly original writer of prose poems, a discerning art critic, and a pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

JAN OWEN is an Australian poet whose sixth book, Poems 1980 – 2008, was published in Melbourne by John Leonard Press. She has been a writer-in-residence at the Cité International des Arts in Paris, and was a guest of the Festival Internationale de la Poésie in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. Her work has won various awards and is included in the anthology, Seven Centuries of Poetry in English (Oxford University Press, 1999) and in the critical work, 60 Classic Australian Poems (UNSW Press, 2009). A Dutch selection of her poems, De Kus, was published by Azul Press in 2010.