Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821 but his father, who was 30 years older than his mother, died only 6 years later. Baudelaire's mother remarried a Major and the family relocated to Lyons. Just before graduation, Baudelaire was kicked out of military school and he moved to the Latin Quarter in Paris, where he experimented with sex and drugs. The first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal was published in 1857, bringing Baudelaire some notoriety. The poems strayed from other Romantics by focusing their attention on the urban landscape. The sexual nature of some of the poems secured Baudelaire's reputation as a poéte maudit. In addition to poetry, Baudelaire published articles and essays on many subjects, and he wrote prose poems that were collected in 1869 as Petits poémes en prose. Baudeliare died in 1867 at the age of 46 in Paris, most likely from complications from syphilis.
À une passante
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair... puis la nuit! - Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
Correspondances
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.
II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
- Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.
Baudelaire's great influence on poetry extends beyond the borders of France. Particularly with his collection Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire took the "beauty as goal" premise of the Parnassians and transformed it into a modern, forward-looking aesthetic with a focus on the poet as alchemist. In this collection the poet plays a conscious role rather than being a passive observer. The poems show a range of tensions as every experience has its opposite: love and hate, desire and disgust. Out of the poet's suffering comes artistic earnings. The poem itself is an experience instead of being simply a vessel of feeling and thought. Baudelaire's work is the first to start in the city, and it is also the first to start with sensory detail--sight, sound, taste, touch. Although Baudelaire found posthumous acclaim with his collected prose poems, Les Fleurs du Mal is considered to be a distillation of his emotional and intellectual experience.
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