Charles Baudelaire

French poet and critic. As well as being a major poet, Baudelaire was one of the foremost art critics of his day. He held that there is no absolute and universal beauty but a different beauty for different peoples and cultures. Beauty arises from the emotions, and therefore every man has his personal beauty. Moreover, the individuality of the artist is essential to the creation of beauty and if it is suppressed or regimented, art becomes banal: 'the beautiful is always bizarre' was a favourite maxim. Baudelaire resisted the claims that art should serve social or moral purposes and was one of the leaders of the 'art for art's sake' school with Gustave Flaubert [1821-80], ThÚophile Gautier [1811-72], and the brothers de Goncourt. He sought to assess the stature of an artist by his ability to portray the heroism of modern life. Delacroix, to whom he devoted some of his most perceptive essays, he found unsuitable owing to his predilection for Romantic and exotic subject matter. Courbet seemed to him too materialistic and he finally chose the relatively minor painter Constantin Guys as the representative par excellence of contemporary society, and wrote a long appreciation of his work entitled Le Peintre de la vie moderne [1863]. He was a friend and supporter of Manet and he is one of the persons depicted in Manet's Music in the Tuileries Gardens [NG, London, 1863] as well as in Courbet's The Painter's Studio [Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 1854-5]. His writings later had great influence on the Symbolists. [Chilvers, Ian, Harold Osborne, and Dennis Farr, eds. Oxford Dictionary Of Art. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.]

French poet and critic. His poetry, classical in form, introduced symbolism by establishing symbolic correspondences among sensory images [e.g., colors, sounds, scents.] The only volume of his poems published in his lifetime, Les Fleurs du mal [1857, enlarged 1861, 1868; sev. Eng. tr., The Flowers of Evil], was publicly condemned as obscene, and six of the poems were suppressed. Later recognized as a masterpiece, the volume is especially remarkable for the brilliant phrasing, rhythm, and expressiveness of its lyrics. Baudelaire's erratic personality was marked by moodiness, rebelliousness, and an intense religious mysticism. His life was burdened with debts, misunderstanding, illness, and excesses, and his work unremittingly reflects inner despair. The main theme is the inseparable nature of beauty and corruption. A collection of poetic prose pieces was published posthumously as Petits Poéms en prose [1869]. As poet and critic Baudelaire earned distinction in literary circles. Believing criticism to be a function of the poet, he wrote perceptive appraisals of his contemporaries. His criticism was collected posthumously in Curiosités esthétiques [1868] and L'Art romantique [1869]. He felt a great affinity to Poe, whose works he translated and brought to the attention of the French public. One of the great figures of French literature, Baudelaire has also been a major influence in other Western poetry. See his letters [tr. by S. Morini and F. Tuten, 1970], his intimate journal [tr. by Chistopher Ishenwood, 1947], and selected letters [tr. and ed. by L. B. and F. E. Hyslop, 1957]; biography by Enid Starkie [rev. ed. 1958], studies by Jean-Paul Sartre [1950, repr. 1972] and M. A. Ruff [1965].