Unnamed Pleasures: Essential Poems

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was born in Paris. Trained in law, he flouted his family's wishes that he pursue a steady career to become a writer. Baudelaire spent freely and drank copiously, becoming known as a dandy in artistic circles, but his writing also quickly gained him renown as an influential thinker and belletrist. His first poetry collection, The Flowers of Evil, published in 1857, confirmed both sides of his reputation - it was instantly influential and highly praised, but also the subject of a notorious obscenity trial. Baudelaire worked across many genres, writing art criticism, poetry, essays, and translations, notably of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Always short of money, and increasingly subject to symptoms of syphilis, he embarked on an ill-fated lecture tour of Belgium, where he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1866, rendering him unable to speak for the final months of his life. His immense influence on French and English literature, already clear in his lifetime, has lived on since his death.

Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is a poet, translator, and a writer of fiction. He has translated the work of Georges Perec, Michèle Métail and Raymond Queneau, and is the author of the novel tapestry, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. His poetry and experimental translations include Oulipoems, Dante's Inferno, and Dictator, a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Globish, which refracts his experience of working with migrants in Sicily with Stories in Transit. The Penguin Book of Oulipo, which he edited, was published in Penguin Modern Classics in 2020, and Carcanet published his edition of Jean-Luc Champerret's The Lascaux Notebooks, the first ever anthology of Ice Age poetry, in April 2022. His version of Dante's Purgatorio, relocated to Mersea Island in Essex, was published in October 2024 - "A Dante like no other" (London Review Bookshop).