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 20th 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."
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!
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!
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!
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.
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.
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