THE KING OF POETS

Poet, critic, translator, dandy, and determined provocateur, Baudelaire represents a threshold in the history of literature. He inherited the passions of Romanticism but turned them toward the metropolis, replacing its sublime landscapes with boulevards, brothels, gaslight, and the madness of crowds. He traced correspondences between perfume, color, sound, and sensation; pursued beauty into places considered ugly or immoral; and experimented with prose until the distinction between poetry and ordinary language began to dissolve. From Symbolism and Decadence to Surrealism and Modernism, much of what followed bears his fingerprints.

And yet, Baudelaire’s revolution was accomplished within a remarkably small body of work, much of it produced amid debt, illness, censorship, and an almost pathological pursuit of perfection.

Born in Paris in 1821, Baudelaire spent his earliest years in circumstances that would later acquire the distant glow of a lost paradise. His father, François Baudelaire, was an elderly former civil servant and amateur artist whose cultivated tastes exposed the young Charles to painting, books, and an elegant, old-world existence. That idyll ended abruptly with his father’s death in 1827. His mother remarried the following year, to the military officer Jacques Aupick, and Baudelaire would spend much of his life regarding the union as a kind of betrayal.

Intelligent, difficult, melancholic, and increasingly resistant to authority, he developed the temperament of an outsider early. Alarmed by his debts and bohemian associations, his family sent him on a sea voyage toward India in 1841, hoping distance and discipline might reform him. He never reached India, turning back after several months, but the voyage left its mark. Exotic ports, distant seas, and the persistent dream of elsewhere would later drift through his poetry.

Back in Paris, Baudelaire devoted himself to literature and to a life deliberately lived against bourgeois convention. He dressed extravagantly, frequented artists, actors, prostitutes, and other inhabitants of the city’s margins, experimented with hashish and opium, accumulated debts, and spent much of the inheritance he received upon coming of age. His family responded by placing his remaining finances under legal guardianship, an arrangement that humiliated him and contributed to the poverty that followed him for the rest of his life.

Yet beneath the image of the decadent dandy was a ferociously disciplined writer. Baudelaire wrote slowly, revised obsessively, and demanded from literature a degree of perfection that made prolificacy impossible. “He only did what he could do supremely well,” observed English poet and translator Arthur Symons. “He was in poverty all his life, not because he would not work, but because he would work only at certain things, the things which he could hope to do to his own satisfaction.” But those things, however few, proved sufficient to transform literature.

Baudelaire was not only a poet but one of the great critics of his century. Writing on Delacroix, Constantin Guys, caricature, beauty, fashion, and the Paris Salons, he argued for an art capable of capturing the fugitive character of contemporary experience. In The Painter of Modern Life, he famously located modernity in “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent,” proposing that the artist must find eternal beauty not by escaping the present but by plunging into it. The metropolis itself became material, full of crowds and characters, prostitutes and dandies, boredom and intoxication, luxury and poverty. Baudelaire made poetry walk the modern street.

His encounter with Edgar Allan Poe proved equally consequential. Baudelaire discovered Poe in the 1840s and recognized him as a peer with almost supernatural intensity. Here was an American writer obsessed, as he was, with beauty and terror, perversity and reason, intoxication, death, and the hidden mechanisms of the mind. Baudelaire came to regard Poe as a kind of spiritual double, claiming to find in his stories thoughts he’d already dreamed.

For nearly two decades, he devoted extraordinary energy to translating Poe into French, producing versions of the tales and essays collected in volumes including Histoires extraordinaires and Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires. Baudelaire approached translation with the same exactitude he brought to poetry, helping establish Poe as a major literary figure in France and, through France, across continental Europe. His Poe became so authoritative that generations of French readers encountered the American writer through Baudelaire’s language.

The exchange worked in both directions. Poe offered Baudelaire a vocabulary for exploring the irrational, the grotesque, the artificial, and the perverse, while Baudelaire’s translations helped transmit those qualities into the literary culture from which Symbolism would emerge. Mallarmé would later translate Poe’s poems; Valéry would write about him; generations of writers inherited a Poe refracted through Baudelaire. Translation, in Baudelaire’s hands, became an act of artistic transmission.

Meanwhile, Baudelaire was constructing the work that would define him. Eighteen poems appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1855 under the title Les Fleurs du mal. The complete first edition followed in 1857, and almost immediately Baudelaire and his publisher were prosecuted for offending public morality. Six poems were suppressed, and Baudelaire was fined. The scandal was fitting, if painful. Les Fleurs du mal sought beauty precisely where respectable society had been trained not to look for it: in corruption, erotic obsession, sickness, ennui, intoxication, urban misery, and death. It sought to show that the forbidden, properly transformed by concentrated imagination and form, might become art.

“He took his revenge by glorifying all the sorrowful things we continually desire to forget,” wrote English poet and translator F. P. Sturm. Baudelaire’s decadence was not an aesthetic pose, but a product of his perspective, his method of seeing. He refused the comforting division between beauty and ugliness, sacred and profane, pleasure and disgust. The poet’s task was not to purify experience but to descend into it and return carrying something luminous.

He continued revising and expanding Les Fleurs du mal while pursuing another experiment that would prove nearly as influential: the prose poems eventually collected as Le Spleen de Paris. Here Baudelaire sought a poetics supple enough to reproduce the discontinuous rhythms of modern consciousness, imagining “a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme” capable of accommodating the shocks, encounters, fantasies, and sudden illuminations of metropolitan life. The form would become one of his great gifts to literature.

His health, however, was collapsing. Years of illness, debt, disappointment, and dependence had accumulated into what he described as an almost metaphysical exhaustion. In 1866, while in Belgium, he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed and largely unable to speak. He returned to Paris, where he died the following year at forty-six, impoverished and frustrated, still revising, still pursuing the perfection that had always remained just beyond reach. He did not live long enough to see the scale of what followed.

Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé recognized in Baudelaire the beginning of something radically new. The Symbolists inherited his correspondences between the senses, his musical conception of language, his distrust of literal description, and his conviction that visible reality concealed another world of suggestion and association. The Decadents inherited his artificial paradises, erotic ambiguities, cultivated ennui, and fascination with fractious beauty. The Surrealists found precedent in his dreams, perversities, and collisions of disparate realities. T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, and countless others would continue to encounter in him one of the essential architects of modern consciousness.

Rimbaud, perhaps his most incandescent heir, called Baudelaire “the first seer, king of poets, a true God.” The description captures something of the magnitude of his influence. Baudelaire changed what a poet was permitted to see, and consequently, changed French poetry. He made the crowded city as worthy of poetry as the pastoral landscape, ennui as consequential as ecstasy, artificiality as revealing as nature, and ugliness capable of generating its own terrible beauty. Through Poe, he demonstrated that translation itself could reshape a literary culture. Through Les Fleurs du mal, he gave succeeding generations permission to descend into the compromised, contradictory experience of modern life and make art from what they found there. Through Le Spleen de Paris, he helped liberate poetry from verse.

Where would French literature—or, for that matter, modern literature—be without Charles Baudelaire? So much that followed seems to pass through him: Symbolism and Decadence, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, the prose poem, the flâneur, the poetry of the metropolis, the fascination with altered states, the aesthetics of alienation, and the artist as both participant in and estranged observer of modern life.

Baudelaire spent his life searching for perfection and died believing much of his work unfinished. But history rendered a different verdict. He had already written the vocabulary of a world that was only beginning to recognize itself.