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| Charles Baudelaire |
Today, The Grandma has gone to the library with her friend and writer Jordi Santanyí. They have gone to borrow a masterpiece of the Literature, Les Fleurs du Mal, in English, The Flowers of Evil written by Charles Baudelaire and published on a day like today in 1857.
The Grandma is a great fan of Charles Baudelaire. She loves poetry and Baudelaire is one of the great French masters of the 19th century. Rereading The Flowers of Evil is something that The Grandma recommends because rereading poetry gives you the opportunity of having different feelings reading the same poems in different moments of your life.
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (9 April 1821-31 August 1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.
His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal, The Flowers of Evil, expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, and rapidly industrializing Paris during the mid-19th century.
Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, among many others. He is credited with coining the term modernity or modernité to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience.
Baudelaire was born in Paris, France, on 9 April 1821, and baptized two months later at Saint-Sulpice Roman Catholic Church. His father, Joseph-François Baudelaire (1759-1827), a senior civil servant and amateur artist, was 34 years older than Baudelaire's mother, Caroline (1794-1871). François died during Baudelaire's childhood, at rue Hautefeuille, Paris, on February 10, 1827. The following year, Caroline married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick, who later became a French ambassador to various noble courts.
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| Charles Baudelaire |
Baudelaire's biographers have often seen this as a crucial moment, considering that finding himself no longer the sole focus of his mother's affection left him with a trauma, which goes some way to explaining the excesses later apparent in his life.
Baudelaire regularly begged his mother for money throughout his career, often promising that a lucrative publishing contract or journalistic commission was just around the corner.
Baudelaire was educated in Lyon, where he boarded. Baudelaire was erratic in his studies, at times diligent, at other times prone to idleness. Later, he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, studying law, a popular course for those not yet decided on any particular career. He began to frequent prostitutes and may have contracted gonorrhea and syphilis during this period. He also began to run up debts, mostly for clothes.
Baudelaire decided to embark upon a literary career. His stepfather sent him on a voyage to Calcutta, India, in 1841 in the hope of ending his dissolute habits. The trip provided strong impressions of the sea, sailing, and exotic ports, that he later employed in his poetry.
More information: University of Texas
Baudelaire later exaggerated his aborted trip to create a legend about his youthful travels and experiences, including riding on elephants. On returning to the taverns of Paris, he began to compose some of the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal.
Baudelaire became known in artistic circles as a dandy and free-spender, going through much of his inheritance and allowance in a short period of time. Baudelaire made a suicide attempt during this period.
He took part in the Revolutions of 1848 and wrote for a revolutionary newspaper. However, his interest in politics was passing, as he was later to note in his journals.
In the early 1850s, Baudelaire struggled with poor health, pressing debts, and irregular literary output. He often moved from one lodging to another to escape creditors. He undertook many projects that he was unable to complete, though he did finish translations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe.
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| Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire |
Upon the death of his stepfather in 1857, Baudelaire received no mention in the will but he was heartened nonetheless that the division with his mother might now be mended.
Baudelaire was a slow and very attentive worker. However he was often sidetracked by indolence, emotional distress and illness, and it was not until 1857 that he published his first and most famous volume of poems, Les Fleurs du mal, The Flowers of Evil. Some of these poems had already appeared in the Revue des deux mondes, Review of Two Worlds, in 1855, when they were published by Baudelaire's friend Auguste Poulet Malassis. Some of the poems had also previously appeared as fugitive verse in various French magazines during the previous decade.
The poems found a small, yet appreciative audience. However, greater public attention was given to their subject matter. The effect on fellow artists was, as Théodore de Banville stated, immense, prodigious, unexpected, mingled with admiration and with some indefinable anxious fear.
The principal themes of sex and death were considered scandalous for the period. He also touched on lesbianism, sacred and profane love, metamorphosis, melancholy, the corruption of the city, lost innocence, the oppressiveness of living, and wine. Notable in some poems is Baudelaire's use of imagery of the sense of smell and of fragrances, which is used to evoke feelings of nostalgia and past intimacy.
More information: Sci-Hi Blog
The book, however, quickly became a byword for unwholesomeness among mainstream critics of the day. Some critics called a few of the poems masterpieces of passion, art and poetry, but other poems were deemed to merit no less than legal action to suppress them.
Baudelaire is one of the major innovators in French literature. His poetry is influenced by the French romantic poets of the earlier 19th century, although its attention to the formal features of verse connects it more closely to the work of the contemporary Parnassians.
As for theme and tone, in his works we see the rejection of the belief in the supremacy of nature and the fundamental goodness of man as typically espoused by the romantics and expressed by them in rhetorical, effusive and public voice in favor of a new urban sensibility, an awareness of individual moral complexity, an interest in vice -linked with decadence- and refined sensual and aesthetic pleasures, and the use of urban subject matter, such as the city, the crowd, individual passers-by, all expressed in highly ordered verse, sometimes through a cynical and ironic voice.
Formally, the use of sound to create atmosphere, and of symbols
-images that take on an expanded function within the poem-, betray a
move towards considering the poem as a self-referential object, an idea
further developed by the Symbolists Verlaine and Mallarmé, who
acknowledge Baudelaire as a pioneer in this regard.
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| Charles Baudelaire |
Beyond his innovations in versification and the theories of symbolism and correspondences, an awareness of which is essential to any appreciation of the literary value of his work, aspects of his work that regularly receive much critical discussion include the role of women, the theological direction of his work and his alleged advocacy of satanism, his experience of drug-induced states of mind, the figure of the dandy, his stance regarding democracy and its implications for the individual, his response to the spiritual uncertainties of the time, his criticisms of the bourgeois, and his advocacy of modern music and painting.
He made Paris the subject of modern poetry. He would bring the city's details to life in the eyes and hearts of his readers.
Baudelaire's influence on the direction of modern French and English language literature was considerable. The most significant French writers to come after him were generous with tributes; four years after his death, Arthur Rimbaud praised him in a letter as the king of poets, a true God. In 1895, Stéphane Mallarmé published a sonnet in Baudelaire's memory, Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire. Marcel Proust, in an essay published in 1922, stated that along with Alfred de Vigny, Baudelaire was the greatest poet of the nineteenth century.
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In the English-speaking world, Edmund Wilson credited Baudelaire as providing an initial impetus for the Symbolist movement, by virtue of his translations of Poe.
In 1930, T. S. Eliot, while asserting that Baudelaire had not yet received a just appreciation even in France, claimed that the poet had great genius and asserted that his technical mastery which can hardly be overpraised... has made his verse an inexhaustible study for later poets, not only in his own language.
At the same time that Eliot was affirming Baudelaire's importance from a broadly conservative and explicitly Christian viewpoint, left-wing critics such as Wilson and Walter Benjamin were able to do so from a dramatically different perspective. Benjamin translated Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens into German and published a major essay on translation as the foreword.
In the late 1930s, Benjamin used Baudelaire as a starting point and focus for his monumental attempt at a materialist assessment of 19th-century culture, Das Passagenwerk. For Benjamin, Baudelaire's importance lay in his anatomies of the crowd, of the city and of modernity. He says that, in Les Fleurs du mal, the specific devaluation of the world of things, as manifested in the commodity, is the foundation of Baudelaire's allegorical intention. François Porche published a poetry collection called Charles Baudelaire: Poetry Collection in memory of Baudelaire.
More information: Fleurs du Mal
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being
able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
Charles Baudelaire
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