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ALEISTER CROWLEY'S PREFACE TO

FOUR LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE

by Charles Baudelaire

Four Little Poems in Prose
by Charles Baudelaire
translated with a preface by Aleister Crowley

No bolder task can possibly be undertaken than the translation of prose so musical, so subtle, so profound as that of Charles Baudelaire. For this task I have but the one qualification of a love so overmastering, so absorbing, that in spite of myself it claims for me a brotherhood with him.

Charles Baudelaire is incomparably the most divine, the most spiritually- minded, of all French thinkers. His hunger for the Infinite was so acute and so persistent that nothing earthly could content him even for a moment. He even made the mistake -- if it be, after all, such a mistake! -- of feeding on poison because he recognized the banality of food; of experimenting with death because he had tried life, and found it fail him.

The thought of Baudelaire has thus been universally recognized as highly unsuitable for the suburbs, as incompatible with any view of life which advocates spiritual complacency, mental and physical contentment. His writings are indeed the deadliest poison for the idle, the optimistic, the overfed: they must fill every really human spirit with that intense and insufferable yearning which drives it forth into the wilderness, whence it can only return charioted by the horses of Apollo and the lions of Demeter, or where it must for ever wander tortured and cast out, uttering ever the hyaena cry of madness, and making its rare meal upon the carrion of the damned.

This yearning has made all the saints and all the sinners; it severs man from his fellows, and sets his feet upon a lonely road, where God and Satan alone, no lesser souls, commune with it.

This yearning is the mother of all artists; in Baudelaire it reaches its highest and most conscious expression. It is for this reason that I tremble and weep, being as it were the bearer of his ashes into those smug and hypocritical lands where the noblest of all languages is prostituted to no other uses than those of gluttony, snobbery and greed.

The condition of England and America today makes it a profanation to translate Baudelaire; yet such is his virtue, and such the innate virtue of humanity, that if this volume only fall into the hands of the young, it may produce a crop of saints and artists even in those barren fields.

Crowley's complete translation of Baudelaire's Petits Poèmes en Prose was published in Paris by Edward W. Titus in 1928 on a distribution contract with Random House of New York. Crowley's version of the "prose poems" -- a now familiar genre which Baudelaire developed and established with these pieces -- had been completed before the first world war, remaining unreleased through a series of publication mishaps. (Some sheets had been printed and warehoused unbound for fifteen years, so that the volume opens with the notice "made and printed partly in Great Britain, partly in France.")