Sur Le Tasse en prison d'Eugène Delacroix
Le poète au cachot, débraillé, maladif,
Roulant un manuscrit sous son pied convulsif,
Mesure d'un regard que la terreur enflamme
L'escalier de vertige où s'abîme son âme.
Les rires enivrants dont s'emplit la prison
Vers l'étrange et l'absurde invitent sa raison;
Le Doute l'environne, et la Peur ridicule,
Hideuse et multiforme, autour de lui circule.
Ce génie enfermé dans un taudis malsain,
Ces grimaces, ces cris, ces spectres dont l'essaim
Tourbillonne, ameuté derrière son oreille,
Ce rêveur que l'horreur de son logis réveille,
Voilà bien ton emblème, åme aux songes obscurs,
Que le Réel étouffe entre ses quatre murs!
— Charles Baudelaire
On Tasso in Prison by Eugene Delacroix
The poet in the dungeon, sickly and unkempt,
Rolling a manuscript under his convulsed foot,
Measures with a look that terror enflames
The stairway of vertigo down which his soul plunges.
The intoxicating laughs that fill the prison
Invite his reason to the strange and the absurd;
Doubt surrounds him and ridiculous Fear,
Hideous and multiform, flows all about him.
This genius imprisoned in a noisome hovel,
Those grimaces, those cries, that swarm of ghosts
Gathered in a pack, swirls behind his car,
This dreamer wakened by the horror of his lodgings,
That's indeed your symbol, Soul with the obscure dreams,
Whom Reality stifles inside its four walls!
— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
On Delacroix's Picture of Tasso in Prison
The poet, sick, and with his chest half bare
Tramples a manuscript in his dark stall,
Gazing with terror at the yawning stair
Down which his spirit finally must fall.
Intoxicating laughs which fill his prison
Invite him to the Strange and the Absurd.
With ugly shapes around him have arisen
Both Doubt and Terror, multiform and blurred.
This genius cooped in an unhealthy hovel,
These cries, grimaces, ghosts that squirm and grovel
Whirling around him, mocking as they call,
This dreamer whom these horrors rouse with screams,
They are your emblem, Soul of misty dreams
Round whom the Real erects its stifling wall.
— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)
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Two editions of Fleurs du mal were published in Baudelaire's lifetime — one in 1857 and an expanded edition in 1861. "Scraps" and censored poems were collected in Les Épaves in 1866. After Baudelaire died the following year, a "definitive" edition appeared in 1868.