Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), full name Charles Pierre Baudelaire, was a French poet and critic. He was a poet of the romantic school, born in Paris. He was distinguished among his contemporaries for his originality, and his influence on others of his class. He was a charming writer of prose as well as verse, as his "Petits Poèmes" in prose bear witness. He is noted for 'Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), a series of 101 lyrics. The work is full of insights into his isolation and melancholy, and also the attraction of evil and the macabre. Victor Hugo once congratulated him on having "created a new shudder"; and as has been said, "this side of his genius attracted most popular attention, which, however, is but one side, and not really the most remarkable, of a singular combination of morbid but delicate analysis and reproduction of the remotest phases and moods of human thought and passion".

Wisdom & Quotes

• If faut epater le bourgeois.

(One must shock the bourgeois.)
- attributed

• I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

- Spleen et ideal

• Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

- Intimate Journal

Sir Richard Francis Burton