Charles Baudelaire


Charles Baudelaire lived in mid-neneteenth century France and is well known both as a groundbreaking poet and as the translator of Edgar Allan Poe's work into French. His most famous collection of poetry is Les Fleurs du Mal (English title: Flowers of Evil), originally published in 1857. The poems in that collectionwere so dark that they shocked the sensibilities of many readers at the time. In fact, the poet and his publisher were convicted of creating an offense against public morals. The French government censored six of the poems, and it was not legal to publish them in that country until the 1940's.

About Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire said, "I put my entire soul, my entire heart, my entire religion, my entire hatred into that horrible book." The thoughts and events that plagued the poet's mind -- too many to list here -- all found their way into his writing. His form of Artistic Lemonade had a profound influence on the evolution of literature -- poetry and prose, in French and English -- making him one of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century.

"An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.”

 

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