Charles Baudelaire

Born in Paris in 1821, Charles Baudelaire became one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century. His work broke with older poetic habits by turning toward the modern city, private despair, sensual pleasure, and the strange pull between the sacred and the corrupt.

His most famous book, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), was published in 1857 and caused an immediate scandal; several poems were prosecuted for offending public morality. That controversy only deepened the book’s reputation, and Baudelaire went on to become a major influence on Symbolist and later modernist writers.

He was also an important critic of art and culture, and his translations of Edgar Allan Poe played a major role in Poe’s French reception. After years marked by debt, illness, and intense literary activity, Baudelaire died in 1867, but his writing has remained a touchstone for readers drawn to poetry that is elegant, restless, and unafraid of darkness.