Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poet and critic, a leader of the symbolist school.

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris on April 9, 1821, and educated at the Collège Louis-le-Grand. His boyhood and adolescence were unhappy, for his father died when he was six years old, and he disliked his stepfather and resented his mother for having married him. Opposed to his choice of a literary career and hoping to distract him, his parents sent him on a sea voyage to India. He left the ship, however, and returned to Paris more determined than ever to devote himself to writing. In an effort to solve his financial problems he began to write critical journalism. His first important publications were two booklets of art criticism, Les salons (1845-1846), in which he discussed with acute insight the paintings and drawings of such contemporary French artists as Honoré Daumier, Édouard Manet, and Eugène Delacroix. He was first acclaimed as a skilled literary craftsman in 1848, when his translations from English of the work of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe began to appear. Encouraged by that success and inspired by his enthusiasm for Poe, with whom he felt a strong affinity, Baudelaire continued to translate Poe’s stories until 1857.

Baudelaire’s major work, the volume of poetry Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), appeared in 1857. Immediately after its publication the French government prosecuted Baudelaire on a charge of offending public morals. Although the elite of French literature came to his support, he was fined, and six poems in the volume were suppressed in subsequent editions. His next work, Les paradis artificiels (1860), is a self-analytical book, based on his own experiences and inspired by Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey. From 1864 to 1866 Baudelaire lived in Belgium. Stricken by paralysis, he was brought back to Paris, where he died on August 31, 1867.

One of the great poets of French literature, Baudelaire possessed a classical sense of form, great skill at choosing the perfectly appropriate word, and a true gift for musical language; he produced some of the most mordant but loveliest verse in the French language. His originality sets him apart from the dominant literary schools of his time. His poetry has been variously regarded as the last brilliant summation of romanticism, the precursor of symbolism, and the first expression of modern techniques. He viewed an individual as a divided being, drawn equally toward God and Satan; his poems deal with the timeless conflict between the ideal and the sensual. They depict all human experiences, from the most sublime to the most sordid.

Among his other writings are Petits poèmes en prose, a collection of prose poems, and his intimate journals, Fusées (Fireworks) and Mon coeur mis à nu (My Heart Laid Bare). All were posthumously published in 1869.