Baudelaire, CHARLES

Baudelaire, CHARLES, was born at Paris on the 21st April 1821. In his youth he travelled to India, and is said to have likewise visited the Mauritius and Madagascar. On his return to Paris he became a notable figure in the second group of Romantic poets who carried on the movement begun by the Romanticists of 1830. His Fleurs du Mal, a volume of poems issued in 1857, was the subject of a prosecution on the score of immorality, and had to undergo expurgation. He afterwards published Les Paradis artificiels, Opium et Haschich, a work partly original, partly composed of selections, admirably translated, from the writings of Poe and De Quincey. His occasional essays, which were finally collected in a volume entitled L'Art romantique, are remarkable for the finish of the style and the subtlety of the criticism. Apart from his verse, however, Baudelaire's finest work is contained in his fifty Petits Poèmes en Prose. All of these are exquisitely written, and in many of them the beauty of the thought is equal to the beauty of the language. Baudelaire died in Paris 31st August 1867. He was neither a prolific nor a popular writer, and he too often misapplied his incisive intellect to repulsive subjects. He united a remarkably keen analytic faculty with a powerful, sombre imagination. Brooding melancholy, curiously tinctured with irony, inspires the solemn music and dreamlike imagery of his best verses. The writer whom, in many respects, he resembles most strongly is Edgar Allan Poe. See Gautier's essay prefixed to the collected edition of Baudelaire's works (5 vols. Paris, 1872), and E. Crepet's Œuvres posthumes et Correspondances intimes de C. Baudelaire (Paris, 1878).