Little Poems in Prose is a New Edition of Aleister Crowley's reverential translation of Charles Baudelaire's Petits Poèmes en Prose. Crowley's translation was completed in the early 1900s, and went to press shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, although the collapse of Crowley's personal finances, and his wartime travels, prevented them from being bound and distributed. In 1928 Crowley met Edward W. Titus, of the Black Manikin Press. After discussion Titus finally issued the work, with a new title-page and a suite of illustrations by the well-known decadent artist Jean de Bosschere, as a Limited Edition under his own imprint in Paris.

This New Edition has been edited by Crowley scholar Martin P. Starr, who has also contributed a Foreword to the book. In addition to the text of the first edition, it contains various materials not found in the original edition, including the manuscript corrections made by Crowley in his own copy, as well as reproductions of eight previously-unpublished drawings by Crowley.

The book is a high quality sewn hardcover, 8 1/4" X 10 1/4", 148 pages, printed on library-quality paper, with an 8 black and white reproductions of sketches by Crowley, and a frontis-piece portrait of Baudelaire after a sketch by Henri Mattisse. Cloth spine, with paper covered boards, delicately imprinted with a line portrait of Baudelaire.
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.-Aleister Crowley