One of the most influential French poets of the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was also an important art critic and translator. In fact, his translations of Edgar Allan Poe's works are considered classics of French prose. Throughout much of his life, however, Baudelaire was dismissed as a vulgar drug addict preoccupied with sex and death. Prosecuted for obscenity and reeling from one financial disaster to another, he produced a number of literary works that went unrecognized during his lifetime. Perhaps the most significant collection of poetry published in Europe during the nineteenth century, his Flowers of Evil was critically condemned, and the remaining years of his life were marked by a sense of failure, disillusionment, and despair. This volume of the poet's essays and drawings—collected and published after his death—includes cryptic memoranda, literary notes, quotations, rough drafts of prose poems, and personal tirades. More than anything else, they reveal the spiritual underpinnings of his work, transcending the squalor of financial ruin and the torture of physical decline to offer compelling thoughts on his world, society, and philosophy.
Author
Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a 19th century French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du Mal; (1857; The Flowers of Evil) which was perhaps the most important and influential poetry collection published in Europe in the 19th century. Similarly, his Petits poèmes en prose (1868; "Little Prose Poems") was the most successful and innovative early experiment in prose poetry of the time. Known for his highly controversial, and often dark poetry, as well as his translation of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire's life was filled with drama and strife, from financial disaster to being prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy. Long after his death many look upon his name as representing depravity and vice. Others see him as being the poet of modern civilization, seeming to speak directly to the 20th century.
