Baudelaire was man enough for damnation (T. S. Eliot).
BAUDELAIRE, Charles, Christopher ISHERWOOD (translator), W.H. AUDEN (introduction). Intimate Journals. London: Methuen and Co. 1949.
8vo. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to spine, in the unclipped dustwrapper priced 25s. Net to the front flap; pp. xiv, 71, [1]; six collotype plates (including frontispiece) with tissue guards, one drawing, upper edges gilt; light rubbing to spine tips, wrapper variously nicked and rubbed to edges and extremities with a little loss to spine tips and corners, neat contemporary ownership name to front free endpaper; a near fine copy in very good wrapper.
First edition thus, one of 750 copies, with a new introduction by W. H. Auden.
The Intimate Journals are made up from papers collected and published after Baudelaire's death. If few entries in the Journals are concerned with poetry, these reflections on love, religion, politics, are very much the work of a poet. In his introduction, W. H. Auden (who loved lists) suggests they can be read in “four different ways at once: as the observations of a human spirit […]; as the observations of a poet […] as distinguished from men with other gifts and professions; as the observations of a Frenchman of the nineteenth century; and as the observations of a French poet of the nineteenth century.” Often cryptic, the fragments repay the attention they demand; as Chrostopher Isherwood writes in his preface, “[t]he more you study these Intimate Journals, the better you will understand them.”
Isherwood's translation was originally issued in a limited edition by The Blackamore Press in 1930 (T. S. Eliot provided the the introduction). This edition, limited to 750 copies and with Auden's introduction, appeared in 1949.
SKU: 2123122