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Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867; French)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2021
Summary
Baudelaire is often considered both France’s last Romantic poet and its first modernist, while his book of poems Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) is widely held to be the greatest collection of the century. After an unhappy childhood he entered the Parisian artistic bohemia, and lived as a “dandy” with a mistress named Jeanne Duval, the “Black Venus” of his poems. He was soon in debt, infected with venereal disease, addicted to opium, and suicidal, but he nonetheless wrote brilliant essays on the art salons of the 1840s. He discovered the work of Edgar Allen Poe and translated most of his stories and some of his poems.
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- Romanticism: 100 Poems , pp. 164 - 165Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021