Celebrating the life of Charles Baudelaire, Poet Extraordinaire

The great French poet Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, whose powerful writing ushered in a era of symbolism, was born in Paris on the 4th of April 1821. Not only a poet of stunning imagery and extraordinary musicality, he was also one of the first to herald that new consciousness, urban, pushing at the edges of things, uncertain of itself,  which we, today, still recognize as our own modern way of being.

Baudelaire life was almost as important as his poetry.  His rejection of bourgeois values, his use of drugs, his fascination with sex, his close friendships with painters and other poets: all of these made him a sort of model for the poet as a 'bohemian' figure.  He is the archetype of the poet as someone who lives his own life on the fringes of society, rebellious in life style, dedicated to moving so far beyond the middle class that his work shocks them so deeply that their either cry out, 'But is it art?' or attempt to censor it as blasphemous, evil, pornographic.

His father, Joseph-François Baudelaire, was a middle ranking civil servant, on his sicties who began his career as a priest and tutor His mother Caroline was much younger than her husband, and had only been twenty-six when she married his father,  two years earlier. She was an orphan with no prospects, which may explain why she married a much older man, and Charles was their only child. Charles seems to have been severely spoilt by his mother in his youth, something which only intensified in 1827 when Francois died at the age of 68 when he Charles was five.

In 1828 Caroline remarried to Jacques Aupick, a half-Irish military officer,giving birth to a still-born child a month later. Because he was no longer the center of his mother’s attention, the incident greatly affected him..

Charles was a smart and gifted student, though given to contrariness and laziness. He generally did well at school in Lyons and Paris, with his natural intelligence helping to counteract this lack of dedication. Despite this, at the age of 17 he was expelled from school for insolence after he refused to give the teacher a note that he had been passed by a classmate. Despite his expulsion, he still took and passed the baccalauréat the same year.

Baudelaire spent the next two years in Paris' Latin Quarter pursuing a career as a writer and accumulating debt. Baudelaire pursued his literary aspirations in earnest but, in order to appease his parents, he agreed to enrol as a "nominal" (non-attending) law student at the École de Droit.His tortured relations with his mother and stepfather are considered by certain biographers to be the foundation of his erratic characterbious  and behaviour (Baudelaire referred to his stepfather as “The General”).

Taking up residence in Paris's Latin Quarter, Baudelaire embarked on a life of promiscuity and social self-indulgence. He sexual encounters (including those with a prostitute, affectionately nicknamed "Squint-Eyed Sarah", who became the subject of some of his most candid and touching early poems) led him to contract syphilis. The venereal disease would lead ultimately to his death but he did not let it dent his bohemian lifestyle which he indulged in with a circle of friends including the poet Gustave Le Vavasseur and the author Ernest Prarond.

In 1841 his parents sent him on ship to India, hoping the experience would help reform his bohemian urges. He left the ship, however, and returned to Paris in 1842. Upon his return, he received a large inheritance, which allowed him to live the life of a Parisian dandy. He developed a love for clothing and spent his days in the art galleries and cafes of Paris. He experimented with drugs such as hashish and opium. 

He fell in love with Jeanne Duval,a Haitian-born actress and dancer of mixed French and black African ancestry, who inspired the "Black Venus" section of Les Fleurs du mal.Duval would come in and out of his life for the rest of his years, and inspired some of Baudelaire's most personal and romantic poetry (including "La Chevelure" ("The Head of Hair")). Baudelaire's mother disapproved of the fact that her son's muse was a poor, racially-blended, actress and his connection with her further tested their already strained relationship

By 1844, he had spent nearly half of his inheritance. His family won a court order that appointed a lawyer to manage Baudelaire's fortune and pay him a small "allowance" for the rest of his life.

For the remainder of Baudelaire’s short life, he begged for money from his mother, friends and publisher. He constantly fled creditors, living at some 40 different addresses in Paris. He fell into a deep depression and in June of 1845 he attempted suicide.

To supplement his income, Baudelaire wrote art criticism, essays, and reviews for various journals. His early criticism of contemporary French painters such as Eugene Delacroix and Gustave Courbet earned him a reputation as a discriminating if idiosyncratic critic. In 1847, he published the autobiographical novella La Fanfarlo. His first publications of poetry also began to appear in journals in the mid-1840s. Charles Baudelaire became acquainted with Edgar Allan Poe in 1847 and came across varied themes in Poe’s poetry that he felt a deep connection with. In 1854 and 1855, he published translations of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he called a "twin soul." His translations were widely acclaimed. 

 He was also intimate of many prominent contemporaries, from Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert to Franz Liszt and Édouard Manet.

Baudelaire coined the term Flâneur in his essay The Painter of Modern Life (1863). A Flâneur is a rather dilettante observer, a person of leisure, an urban explorer. While others at this point in history had seen flâneurs in a negative light and tried to paint them as unmotivated, indecisive men, Baudelaire held the flâneur in high esteem.

According to Wikipedia, Baudelaire is also credited with the term modernity, meaning the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience.

Baudelaire’s poetry was groundbreaking for its time, drawing from the Romantic tradition but rejecting nature and essential goodness as its organizing themes. Instead, he created a poetry of the modern, which incorporated urban imagery and subjects; a complex morality that dwelled on decadence, death, and sin; and symbols and sensory elements that gave his works a primal resonance.

Apart from his literary contributions, Baudelaire also participated in the French Revolution of 1848 that lead to the overthrow of the constitutional monarchy.He had shown no radical political allegiances hitherto (if anything had been more sympathetic towards the interests of the petit-bourgeois class in which he had been born) and many in his circle were taken aback by his actions.

It is possible (likely even) that his actions were an attempt to anger his family; especially his stepfather who was a symbol of the French establishment (some unsubstantiated accounts suggest Baudelaire was seen brandishing a musket and urging insurgents to "shoot general Aupick").It is said he even tried to organise a squad of revolutionaries to go and shoot his step-father. As the riots were quickly put down by King Charles X, Baudelaire was once more absorbed by his literary pursuits and in 1848 he co-founded a news-sheet entitled Le Salut Public. Though funds only allowed for two issues it helped raise Baudelaire's creative profile. Baudelaire also took an active part in the resistance to the Bonapartist military coup in December 1851 but declared soon after that his involvement in political matters was over and he would, henceforward, devote all his intellectual passions to his writings.

In 1865 he wrote: “Yes! Hurrah for the Revolution! Always! In spite of all! But me, I am no dupe, I have never been a dupe. I cry Hurrah for the Republic the way I would cry Hurrah for Destruction! Hurrah for Expiation! Hurrah for Punishment! Hurrah for Death" 

Baudelaire was also a dandy, clean-shaven in an age of whiskers and dressed immaculately despite squalid domestic circumstances. Never ostentatious, he wore sombre black in mourning for his times.

Considering nature to be tyrannical, he championed everything which fought or transcended it, while being, like many of his contemporaries, overtly misogynistic. “Woman is natural. That is to say, abominable,”he wrote.

Nevertheless, he recognised how both genders were trapped within their fleshly prisons and urged resistance to such incarceration through costume and cosmetics, recreational sex, drugs and alcohol.A self conscious decadent who believed in Original Sin and his poetry was largely a reflection on his own damnation. He flaunted bourgeois norms, and it wasn’t enough to reject the culture of the stolid bourgeois. It had to be attacked and torn down.

Baudelaire's reputation as a rebel poet was confirmed in June 1857 with the publication of his masterpiece Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). Although an anthology, Baudelaire insisted that the individual poems only achieved their full meaning when read in relation to one another; as part of a "singular framework" as he put it. In addition to its shifting views of romantic and physical love, the collected pieces covered Baudelaire's views on art, beauty, and the idea of the artist as martyr, visionary, pariah and/or even fool.

Now considered a landmark in French literary history, it met with controversy on publication when a selection of 13 (from 100) poems were denounced by the press as pornographic. On July 7, 1857 the Ministry of the Interior arranged for a case to be brought before the public prosecutor on charges relating to public morality. Unsold copies of the book were seized and a trial was held on the 20^th of August when six of the poems were found to be indecent. As well as the demand to remove the offending entries, Baudelaire received a fine of 50 francs (reduced on appeal from 300 francs). Disgusted by the court's decision, Baudelaire refused to let his publisher remove the poems and instead wrote 20-or-so new poems to be included in a revised extended edition published in 1861. (The banned six poems were later republished in Belgium in 1866 in the collection Les Épaves (Wreckage) with the official French ban on the original edition not lifted until 1949.)

Some still have the power to shock, like Baudelaire’s description of sex with a vampire: “When she had drained the marrow out of all my bones/When I turned listlessly amid my languid moans/To give a kiss of love, no thing was with me but/A greasy leather flask that overflowed with pus!”

Baudelaire seemed unable to comprehend the controversy his publication had aroused: "no one, including myself, could suppose that a book imbued with such an evident and ardent spirituality [...] could be made the object of a prosecution, or rather could have given rise to misunderstanding" he wrote. Professor André Guyaux describes how the trial, "was not due to the sudden displeasure of a few magistrates. It was the result of an orchestrated press campaign denouncing a 'sick' book [and even] though Baudelaire achieved rapid fame, all those who refused to acknowledge his genius considered him to be dangerous. And there were quite a few". This trial, and the controversy surrounding it, made Baudelaire a household name in France but it also prevented him from achieving commercial success.

 Les Fleurs du mal  though afforded Baudelaire a degree of notoriety; writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo wrote in praise of the poems. Flaubert wrote to Baudelaire claiming, "You have found a way to inject new life into Romanticism. You are unlike anyone else [which is the most important quality]." Unlike earlier Romantics, Baudelaire looked to the urban life of Paris for inspiration. He argued that art must create beauty from even the most depraved or "non-poetic" situations.

Les Fleurs du mal, with its explicit sexual content and juxtapositions of urban beauty and decay, only added to Baudelaire's reputation as a poéte maudit (cursed poet). Baudelaire enhanced this reputation by flaunting his eccentricities; for instance, he once asked a friend in the middle of a conversation "Wouldn't it be agreeable to take a bath with me?"

However the weight of the trial, his poor living conditions, and a lack of money weighed heavily on Baudelaire and he sunk once more into depression. His physical health was also beginning to seriously decline due to developing complications with syphilis. He started to take a morphine-based tincture (laudanum) which led in turn to an opium dependency.

 Baudelaire composed the series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen between 1855 and his death in 1867. He attached great importance to his work in this then unusual form, asking, “Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?"

From 1856 onwards, the venereal infection, alcoholic excess and opium addiction were working in an unholy alliance to push Baudelaire down to an early grave.. Things with his family did not improve either. Even after his stepfather's death in April 1857, he and his mother were unable to properly reconcile because of the disgrace she felt at him being publicly denounced as a pornographer.

In the 1860s Baudelaire continued to write articles and essays on a wide range of subjects and figures. He was also publishing prose poems, which were posthumously collected in 1869 as Petits poémes en prose (Little Poems in Prose). By calling these non-metrical compositions poems, Baudelaire was the first poet to make a radical break with the form of verse.

In the last years of his life, Baudelaire fell into a deep depression and once more contemplated suicide. He attempted to improve his state of mind (and earn money) by giving readings and lectures, and in April 1864 he left Paris for an extended stay in Brussels to give a series of lectures,. He had also hoped to persuade a Belgium publisher to print his complete works but his fortunes failed to improve and he was left feeling deeply embittered.

He suffered from several strokes that resulted in partial paralysis.His mother collected her son from Brussels and took him back to Paris where he was admitted to a nursing home.He never left the home and died there the following year on 16 On August 31, 1867, in his mother's arms,at  the age of only forty-six.Although doctors at the time didn't mention it, it is likely that syphilis caused his final illness.  A non-conformist in his maturity, at his death, after more than a year of aphasia, he received the last rites of the Roman Catholic church, and was buried in the family vault in Montparnasse Cemetery.

His  reputation as poet at that time was secure; writers such as Stephane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud claimed him as a predecessor. Rimbaud called Baudelaire “the king of poets, a true God”. Proust labelled him “the greatest poet of the 19th-century” 

His prose poetry, so rich in metaphor, would also directly inspire the Surrealists with Andre Breton lauding Baudelaire in Le Surréalisme et La Peinture as a champion "of the imagination".

In the 20th century, thinkers and artists as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney have celebrated his work. TS Eliot paid Baudelaire the compliment of stealing the last line of the introduction to Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire’s best-known volume, for The Waste Land: “You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!” 

Feted too by the Beats (along with Rimbaud) as the original urban stoned visionary, Baudelaire also became a hero to the singer-lyricists who succeeded them as counterculture stars in the 60s – Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison all drew on him, while Mick Jagger claimed that “Sympathy for the Devil” came from “my Baudelaire books”. His influence continued into the 70s with Patti Smith and John Cooper-Clarke, until punk gave way to ... dandyism, another Baudelairean legacy,

Baudelaire's contribution to the age of modernity was profound.The following excerpt comes from Peter Gay’s book Modernism: The Lure of Heresy: “No single poet, no single painter or composer can securely claim to have been the “onlie begetter” of modernism. But the most plausible candidate for that role was Charles Baudelaire. For the history of modernism, he is – along with a chosen few like Marcel Duchamp or Virginia Woolf, Igor Stravinsky or Orson Welles – absolutely indispensable. His original, intensely stimulating art criticism, his candid autobiographical ruminations, his influential translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s dark tales for a French audience, his defiance of accepted boundaries in his deeply personal poetry – above all, that poetry – bear the stamp of a founder. "

As professor André Guyaux observed, he was "obsessed with the idea of modernity [and in fact] gave the word its full meaning". 

But no single figure did more to cement Baudelaire's legend than the influential German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin whose collected essays on Baudelaire, The Writer of Modern Life,https://www.academia.edu/15562217/_Walter_Benjamin_the_Writer_of_Modern_Life claimed the Frenchman as a new hero of the modern age and positioned him at the very center of the social and cultural history of mid-to-late nineteenth-century Paris. It was Benjamin who transported Baudelaire's flâneur into the twentieth century, figuring him as an essential component of our understandings of modernity, urbanisation and class alienation. Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flaneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: "Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flaneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer." Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank.

Known for his dark and intriguing observations about life, Baudelaire is as controversial and heralded today as he was in the 19th Century. Charles Baudelaire's influence over poets, writers, and even musicians is a testament both to his talent and the cult of personality that has grown as much out of his lifestyle as is poetry. He is acknowledged as one of the greatest of 19th-century French poets,a continuing source of literary bent hedonists everywhere, me included. I will leave you with some words from him,not much darkness, but much, much beauty, hope you enjoy as much as I do.

Be Drunk - Charles Baudelaire

 

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it--it's the
only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks
your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually
drunk.
But on what?Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be
drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of
a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again,
drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave,
the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything
that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is
singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and
wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you:"It is time to be
drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be
continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish." 

 

 Hymn to Beauty- Charles Baudelaire

 

Oh Beauty! dost thou generate from Heaven or from Hell?

Within thy glance, so diabolic and divine,

Confusedly both wickedness and goodness dwell,

And hence one might compare thee unto sparkling wine.

 

Thy look containeth both the dawn and sunset stars,

Thy perfumes, as upon a sultry night exhale,

Thy kiss a philter, and thy mouth a Grecian vase,

That renders heroes cowardly and infants hale.

 

Yea, art thou from the planets, or the fiery womb?

The demon follows in thy train, with magic fraught,

Thou scatter'st seeds haphazardly of joy and doom,

Thou govern'st everything, but answer'st unto nought.

 

O Loveliness! thou spurnest corpses with delight,

Among thy jewels, Horror hath such charms for thee,

And Murder 'mid thy mostly cherished trinklets bright,

Upon thy massive bosom dances amorously.

 

Tthe blinded, fluttering moth towards the candle flies,

Then frizzles, falls, and falters—"Blessings unto thee"

The panting swain that o'er his beauteous mistress sighs,

Seems like the Sick, that stroke their gravestones lovingly.

 

What matter, if thou comest from the Heavens or Hell,

O Beauty, frightful ghoul, ingenuous and obscure!

So long thine eyes, thy smile, to me the way can tell

Towards that Infinite I love, but never saw.

 

From God or Satan? Angel, Mermaid, Proserpine?

What matter if thou makest—blithe, voluptuous sprite—

With rhythms, perfumes, visions—O mine only queen!—

The universe less hideous and the hours less trite. 

 

Evening Harmony - Charles Baudelaire

 

The hour has come at last when, trembling to and fro,
Each flower is a censer sifting its perfume;
The scent and sounds all swirl in evening’s gentle fume;
A melancholy waltz, a languid vertigo!

Each flower is a censer sifting its perfume;
A violin’s vibrato wounds the heart of woe;
A melancholy waltz, a languid vertigo!
The sky, a lofty altar, lovely in the gloom,

A violin’s vibrato wounds the heart of woe,
A tender heart detests the black of nullity,
The sky, a lofty altar, lovely in the gloom;
The sun is drowning in the evening’s blood-red glow.

A tender heart detests the black of nullity,
And lovingly preserves each trace of long ago!
The sun is drowning in the evening’s blood-red glow …
Your memory shines through me like an ostensory!

  "Hymn to Beauty" is reprinted from The Flowers of Evil. Charles Baudelaire. London: Elkin Mathews, 1909.

 

Hymn - Charles Baudelaire 

 

 To the too-dear, to the too-beautiful,
who fills my heart with clarity,
to the angel, to the immortal idol,
All hail, in immortality!
She flows through my reality,
air, mixed with the salt sea-swell:
into my soul's ecstasy,
pours the essence of the eternal;
Ever-fresh sachet, that scents
the dear corner's atmospheric light,
hidden smoke, of the burning censer,
in the secret paths of night.
How, incorruptible love,
to express your endless verities?
Grain of musk, unseen, above,
in the depths of my infinities!
To the too-dear, to the too-beautiful,
who is my joy and sanity,
to the angel, to the immortal idol,
All hail in immortality!

 

Lover's Wine - Charles Baudelaire

 

Today Space is fine!
Like a horse mount this wine,
without bridle, spurs, bit,
for a heaven divine!
We, two angels they torture
with merciless fever,
will this mirage pursue
in the day's crystal blue!
Sweetly balanced, fly higher
through the whirlwind's wise air
in our mirrored desire,
my sister, swim there
without rest or respite
to my dream paradise!

 

The Sunset of Romanticism

 

 How beautiful a new sun is when it rises,
flashing out its greeting, like an explosion!
- Happy, whoever hails with sweet emotion
its descent, nobler than a dream, to our eyes!
I remember! I've seen all, flower, furrow, fountain,
swoon beneath its look, like a throbbing heart…
- Let's run quickly, it's late, towards the horizon,
to catch at least one slanting ray as it departs!
But I pursue the vanishing God in vain:
irresistible Night establishes its sway,
full of shudders, black, dismal, cold:
an odour of the tomb floats in the shadow,
at the swamp's edge, feet faltering I go,
bruising damp slugs, and unexpected toads.

 

“The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds 

Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day; 

But on the ground, among the hooting crowds, 

He cannot walk, his wings are in the way" -  Charles Baudelare

 A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.”- Charles Baudelaire. 

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”- Charles Baudelaire.

“Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.”

- Charles Baudelaire.