Fanfarlo

Only poets are innocent enough to invent such monstrosities. Ten years before Baudelaire published his masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil, the great poet penned the only prose fiction of his career: La Fanfarlo. The novella describes the torrid real-life affair the poet had with Jean Duval, a dancer whose beauty and sexuality Baudelaire came to obsess over. The outcome is a work of raw emotional power and a clear distillation of the Parisian's poetic genius. As Baudelaire himself said, "Always be a poet, even in prose."

Year

2012

Language

English

Publisher

Melville House Publishing

Editions

1

Pages

66

ISBN

9781612191096

Data source: Wikidata