Baudelaire, Charles, << `bohd` LAIR, shahrl >> (1821-1867), was the most influential French poet of the 1800’s. His bold poetry inaugurated a European literary revolution, and his art criticism and literary essays anticipate modern theories of painting and poetry.
Baudelaire’s notorious collection of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), traces a spiritual journey from corrupt life to purified existence. It shocked readers with its focus on death and decay, dreamy or strange pleasures, and rebellion against middle-class values. The collection, especially the sonnet “Correspondences,” inspired a group of French poets known as symbolists. “Correspondences” describes the interplay of the five senses in creative imagination. In the second edition (1861), the section “Tableaux parisiens” (“Parisian Pictures”) emphasizes the sorrows of everyday life. It stresses the poet’s compassion for the poor, the aged, and the sorrows of mortal existence.
Baudelaire developed a type of literature called prose poems, which are printed as prose but have allegorical features and rhythm and imagery. The prose poems appeared in the collection Petits Poemes en prose (1869), later called Paris Spleen. These works dramatize the conflict between lyrical illusion and reality.
Baudelaire defined the characteristics of modern consciousness in the essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” He also wrote on German composer Richard Wagner, French painter Eugene Delacroix, and French authors Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert. Baudelaire established the European reputation of American writer Edgar Allan Poe by translating his stories into vivid French.
Baudelaire was born in Paris on April 9, 1821. He died on Aug. 31, 1867.
