Baudelaire's prose poems had two working titles: "Petits Poemes en prose" (small prose poems) and "Le Spleen de Paris". Francis Scarfe's version of this title, argued for in his introduction, is "Paris Blues". Baudelaire wrote these pieces over many...

Few have written more memorably about the work of poetry and the poetics of work than Juan Ramon Jimenez, winner of a Nobel Prize and discerning teacher of an entire generation of Spanish poets. In this series of aphorisms, Jimenez brings together th...

Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, and particularly the poet, a figure of freedom in Western culture? The MacArthur Award-winning poet and critic Susan Stewart ponders these questions in "The Poet's Freed...