Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) was a French poet, essayist, and critic. The British poet and essayist T. S. Eliot once said that Baudelaire was “the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language.” Such admiration is even more extraordinary considering Baudelaire’s whole works consist merely of a single volume of poetry, a book of prose poems, criticism, and three volumes of translations of the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
Baudelaire had an unhappy life. He was born to a wealthy family in Paris. However, when his father died when he was six, he revolted under the stern discipline of his stepfather. He got expelled from military school and squandered much of his inheritance on clothes, sex, and drugs. When Baudelaire turned 21, his family, worried about his eccentric behavior and debts, got a court order to seize the remainder of his inheritance and disbursed it in small allowances for the rest of his life.
Baudelaire started writing essays, criticism, and translations to fund his indulgences. Baudelaire lived in the worst neighborhoods of Paris and switched apartments frequently to escape creditors. He struggled with poor health throughout his life and died at 46. The posthumous publication of much of his writing allowed his mother to settle his many debts.
At 36, Baudelaire published his only collection of lyric poetry, Les Fleurs de Mal (1857, The Flowers of Evil,) considered one of the most significant collections of French poetry. The book’s adulation of free love, drunkenness, world-weariness, and despair has influenced generations of bohemian artists. Baudelaire gained instant celebrity as a poète maudit (cursed poet) when six of the 101 poems in Les Fleurs de Mal were censored out for their moral and sexual themes, which were then considered obscene and scandalous.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Charles Baudelaire
I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Madness
There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Virtues, Virtue
There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced—of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Success
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Prayer
Hypocrite reader—my fellow—my brother!
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Books, Reading
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Fantasy
Today I felt pass over me
A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Sanity
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Originality, Innovation
I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Soul, Gambling
Nature is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Nature
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Evil
On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers, Art
A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Water
To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art—that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Aspirations, Romance
We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Government
It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Love
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Poets, Poetry, Art
Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Opportunities, Reality
A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Happiness
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Beauty
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Genius
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Awareness
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Soldiers
To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Critics, Criticism, Art
The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings—woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general… only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Women
If a certain assemblage of trees, of mountains, of waters, and of houses that we call a landscape is beautiful, it is not because of itself, but through me, through my own indulgence, through the thought or the sentiment that I attach to it
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Wilderness
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
—Charles Baudelaire
All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Fashion
Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Dance, Dancing
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