Charles Baudelaire / "The King of Poets"

Charles Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a notable French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic and translator of Edgar Allen Poe's work. Celebrated as one of the major innovators in French literature, in his works we see the rejection of the belief in the supremacy of nature and the fundamental goodness of man as typically espoused by the romantics and expressed by them in rhetorical, effusive and public voice in favor of a new urban sensibility, an awareness of individual moral complexity, an interest in vice (linked with decadence) and refined sensual and aesthetical pleasures, and the use of urban subject matter, such as the city, the crowd, individual passers-by, all expressed in highly ordered verse, sometimes through a cynical and ironic voice. Formally, the use of sound to create atmosphere, and of 'symbols', (images which take on an expanded function within the poem), betray a move towards considering the poem as a self-referential object, an idea further developed by the Symbolists Verlaine and Mallarmé, who acknowledge Baudelaire as a pioneer in this regard.

The whole world was moving towards the rejection of morality as aesthetic wave swept in every sphere of life. 'Les Fleurs du Mal' (1857) had caused outrage and several of Baudelaire's poems were banned on the grounds of such scandalous themes as sex and death. Similar fate was met by Flaubert's novel, 'Madame Bovary' in  1856. Manet's painting 'The Absinthe Drinker' was rejected by the Salon for the similar reason of not being according to the conventional standard of painting.

The anguished romanticism of Baudelaire can be heard in these lines from 'Les Fleur du Mal'-

O agony, agony! Time

eats away at life,

And the obscure Foe which

gnaws on our hearts.

Grows ever stronger on the

 blood we lose!

Baudelaire's influence on the direction of modern French (and English) language literature was considerable. The most significant French writers to come after him were generous with tributes; four years after his death, Arthur Rimbaud praised him in a letter as 'the king of poets, a true God'. In 1895, Stéphane Mallarmé published a sonnet in Baudelaire's memory, 'Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire'. Marcel Proust, in an essay published in 1922, stated that along with Alfred de Vigny, Baudelaire was 'the greatest poet of the nineteenth century'

In 1930, T. S. Eliot, while asserting that Baudelaire had not yet received a "just appreciation" even in France, claimed that the poet had "great genius" and asserted that his "technical mastery which can hardly be overpraised... has made his verse an inexhaustible study for later poets, not only in his own language". Eliot also alluded to Baudelaire's poetry directly ın his own poetry. For example, he quoted the last line of Baudelaire's 'Au Lecteur' ın the last line of Sectıon I of The Waste Land