Charles
Baudelaire (1821-66) took his themes from city life
and introduced
many of the preoccupations
of Modernism. Charles was born the son of François Baudelaire,
an ex-priest who was 60 and a widower when he married Caroline
Dufaÿs, a penniless orphan of 26. His father died in 1827,
and Charles was brought up by his stepfather, Major Jacques
Aupick, a brilliant, forceful
man who eventually became a general and senator. Relations
were initially cordial but Charles worshipped his mother,
and relied on her help throughout his life. Charles was
packed
off to boarding school, expelled, enrolled at the École
de Droit, became addicted to opium, contracted syphilis,
and fell into debt. Law studies were terminated and in 1841
Charles was propelled on a voyage to India, towards which
he got as far as Mauritius. He returned to Paris, took up
with Jeanne
Duval, possibly
between other relationships, and lived precariously on his
father's inheritance. In 1847 he published an autobiographical
novel, and spent the following years translating Edgar Allan
Poe. Les
Fleurs du Mal appeared in 1857, and resulted in
prosecution for obscenity and blasphemy for all involved.
A second
edition appeared in 1861, and Baudelaire also became known
as a art critic, supporting Delacroix, Daumier, Manet and
others. In 1862 he suffered a minor stroke, and the excesses
began to take their toll. He was harassed by financial
troubles, spent an unhappy period in Belgium and in
1866 returned, seriously ill, to Paris and a sanatorium.
Baudelaire died,
his mother at the bedside, in a Paris clinic of aphasia
and hemiplegia on August 31, 1867.
Baudelaire's
poetry
Baudelaire
posed, as far as finances permitted, as an aesthete
and the dandy,
opposed
to conventional
morality and the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie.
Life was purposeless.
He equate the modern with the artificial, even decadent,
and shocked his contemporaries with his views of the loneliness,
immorality
and heartlessness of the modern city. Much of that now seems
unexceptional, or has passed into history, and Baudelaire
is today read for his originality
and sheer
poetry. He distrusted the Romantic's practice of spontaneity,
and indeed their faith
in the innate goodness of man and nature, but thickened
the texture of his work with dreams, myths and symbolism
and imposed a stern discipline of verse
perfection. Baudelaire was an incessant reviser. Though
he loved the city and its artificiality,
being fascinated by perfume, jewels and bought sex, his
thought also lingered on childhood and exotic, faraway
places. Poetry had to have an element of strangeness, even
horror, which was not contrived: all imaginings should be
accompanied by sensory recall: a view that developed into
Symbolism, with its correspondences between the visible
and non-visible. Though he championed Delacroix,
Baudelaire's art
criticism also stressed the need to represent the contemporary
and the heroism of everyday life. His critical writing,
much of it still readable, extended to music
and literature, and he was especially fond of Chateaubriand,
Balzac,
and Stendhal.
19th Century
French poetry
Baudelaire
shares his nineteenth century celebrity with several
French poets of the first rank: ArthurRimbaud,
PaulVerlaine,
StephaneMallarmé
and, above all, VictorHugo. Common to all but the last
(and arguably the greatest) poet is the Modernist flight
from realism,
and its cult of alienation
and social
failure. The subtle beauty, intelligence, and linguistic
complexity were not for the profane majority. Baudelaire's
poetry explored symbols selected for their tendency to evoke
one sensory experience through another, so elevating experience
to the level of intellect. Mallarmé populated a universe
with symbols lacking obvious referents. Postmodernist theory,
with its reification
of language, has moved beyond such symbols to the analysis
of linguistic signs and their signification. Deconstructionrefuses
to accept any reality outside words, for example, and
the avant-garde in its turn has moved from the bohemian
world of Baudelaire to academia and the small presses.
