Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet, essayist, and art critic whose collection Les Fleurs du mal helped shape modern poetry.
Les Fleurs du mal: Baudelaire’s 1857 poetry collection, whose explorations of beauty, desire, decay, and evil shaped modern lyric poetry. This collection is the central work through which Baudelaire’s poetic project took form.
Correspondances: A sonnet by Baudelaire in which nature appears as a symbolic language linking sensory impressions. The poem shows how sensory details can point beyond themselves in Baudelaire’s verse.
Théophile Gautier: A French poet, novelist, and critic associated with Romanticism and the doctrine of art for art’s sake. Baudelaire dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to Gautier, whose aesthetic ideals shaped the collection’s reception.
Trial of Les Fleurs du mal: The 1857 French prosecution of Baudelaire and his publisher for offending public morality with six poems. The trial exposed the conflict between Baudelaire’s art and Second Empire censorship.
The Painter of Modern Life: Baudelaire’s 1863 essay on the artist Constantin Guys and the aesthetics of contemporary urban life. Its account of modernity clarifies the new subject matter Baudelaire found in city life.
Spleen: A state of oppressive melancholy associated with boredom, alienation, and emotional heaviness. Baudelaire repeatedly makes this condition the pressure that poetic form must contain.
Edgar Allan Poe: An American writer of poetry and fiction whose works Baudelaire translated extensively into French. Baudelaire’s translations and essays made Poe a major influence on French literary culture.
French Symbolist poetry: A late nineteenth-century poetic movement that favored musical language, suggestion, and symbolic imagery. Symbolist poets treated Baudelaire as a precursor to their break with direct description.
French Romanticism: A nineteenth-century literary and artistic movement emphasizing emotion, imagination, nature, and individual experience. Baudelaire inherited Romantic intensity while redirecting it toward modern urban experience.
Symbolism: A literary and artistic movement that uses symbols, suggestion, and sound to evoke meanings beyond direct description. Baudelaire’s suggestive imagery helped prepare the poetic methods later associated with Symbolism.