French poet.

Double and conscious of its fundamental duplicity - dark slope, temptation of the satanism and the destruction; luminous slope, aspiration with the ideal, God, with creation, which manages to cohabit only in the suffering, passion, the dislike and hatred -, Baudelaire was not satisfied to be a groaning poet. If, romantic truth, it spoke only about itself in all that it wrote, it also lucidly sought to control the powers of the art, which its acute glance of critic professional managed to seize.

Son of a man of the Lights too early disappeared (the father of Baudelaire was sixty two years old with its birth, its mother twenty-seven), Baudelaire lived his childhood in full romanticism. Unhappy childhood, between his/her mother, whom he adored but to which he did not forgive his remarriage, and her father-in-law, the future Aupick general, which did not understand large-thing with this young person, fragile and full with contradictions, of which he was to assume education.

Classically intended “to make its right”, Baudelaire chooses quickly Bohemian Latin Quarter. At twenty years, whereas it already had a a little noisy connection with a Jewish prostitute (Sarah Louchette), and that the family relations become difficult, Baudelaire embarks for the East: in fact, it stops a few weeks in Mauritius, then with the Meeting, fills the eyes with images and of sumptuous colors, discovers the powers of the sensuality and returns to France as of February 1842, after ten months of absence. Major, it receives the heritage of his father and carries out a life which its family regards as rather dissolute (the Aupick general saw of bad. it its connection with a “mulatto”, Jeanne Duval, her frequentations “artists”, in short, its marginal choices) to impose a Trusteeship Council to him, which deprives it of the pleasure of its goods. This measurement makes of Baudelaire a minor with life: it gives form to all the sufferings of the poet, whose correspondence with his/her mother is made the echo.

A difficult existence begins, marked often the blackest despair (suicide attempt in 1845), material embarrassment - it becomes art critic, to survive -, soon of the disease (syphilis) and a poetic work which costs him enough so that it compared to Sisyphus condemned to roll his rock. Years 1845-1848 are those where Baudelaire composes more a large number of parts of the Flowers of the evil. He at that time discovers the work of Edgar Poe, whom he admires and will translate partly, binds with Marie Daubrun (the soft woman with the green eyes of the Flowers of the evil), engages at the sides of the revolutionists in 1848, especially because he wants to believe that he “will shoot the Aupick general”! But the shortly after the revolution nauseate it, just like will revolt it the coup d'etat of December 2nd, 1851.

The accursed poet

Prodigiously gifted for the suffering and loneliness, stormy and impulsive, it completes to weaken while being interested in the wine, the hashish, and moves away from the middle-class conformism which it has of horror. Its turbid and stormy passion with continuous Jeanne, crossed other loves (for Mrs. Sabatier, in particular). It publishes, in 1857, the Flowers of the evil: he is at once condemned for “immorality” (this same year is that of the lawsuit of Flaubert for Mrs Bovary) and sees his collection amputee of several poems considered to be particularly scandalous.

This year dies general Aupick and Baudelaire brings closer to its mother, with which it acknowledges its worship of disappointed child and with the feet of which it is trailed, since it is necessary to insulting it the moment according to. It publishes the artificial Paradises (celebration of drugs which allow elsewhere) in 1860, continues its work of lucid and bold art critic by defending Richard Wagner, whom nobody understands, Olympia de Manet, before which the middle-class veil the face, and the delicate art of Constantin Guys, painter of the modern life, his brother and his mirror.

While he works with a kind of autobiography, My heart exposed, and that he publishes, in 1862, from the prose poems under the title of Spleen of Paris, he suffers more and more from the after-effects of syphilis. After a two years stay in Belgium (from where it brings back an atrocious lampoon: Poor Belgium), it is struck of hemiplegia and dies in Paris on on August 31st, 1867, at forty six years.

Criticism was the trade of Baudelaire: it gave an account of the exposures and the Parisian Living rooms (Living rooms, 1845-1859), therefore primarily of painting and sculpture, before being interested in the music and the literature. It enabled him to fix its hatreds, its tastes, better still: its clean poetic. Do its hatreds - because for Baudelaire does criticism have to be partial, impassioned, political - go to conformism, the academism, the “monkeys” of the feeling as photography, this technique which the middle-class men like for which the finality of art is to copy nature? Its tastes go to the color (rather than with the drawing), to modern painting - especially that of Delacroix, than he crowns the great painter of his time -, with the caricature, works finally where a heart is expressed, by imagination and the sensitivity. After its death two collections of its art critics (esthetic Curiosities will appear, 1868; romantic Art, 1868-1870).

The choice of the romanticism and modernity

Criticism of Baudelaire, poetic emerges: criticism is an esthetic act except for whole, which fixes choices. That of the romanticism is first for Baudelaire, which analyzes it like the most current expression of beautiful, manner of feeling its time and not collection of subjects; the romanticism is thus intimacy, spirituality, color, taste of the infinite one. Criticism invites the artist to seek modernity everywhere, to be diverted models: the modern life also is beautiful, heroic perhaps, intensely poetic. It is what Constantin Guys felt: in its fast sketches and its delicious drawings, it understood the expression even, fugacious and eternal, one time. Neither toilets of the women - the fashion, that the dandyism of Baudelaire takes care not to scorn -, neither the smoothness of the make-up, neither the movement of the cars, nor the trembling and equivocal light of the places of pleasure appeared unworthy to him of its brush.

Against the “bourgeoisism”

Lastly, from this intelligent criticism, able, in literature as in music, to understand the true talents and the contemporary geniuses (Baudelaire pays homage to Balzac, Flaubert, takes some distance compared to Hugo, but does not forget not forgotten, like Marceline Desbordes-Valmore or Pétrus Borel), emerges a hatred of the “bourgeoisism”, fact of stereotypes, flatnesses, confusions, which becomes hatred of useful and progress, the god of the XIX ^E century. For Baudelaire, art has of another finality only the Beauty: it is thus foreign with morals, at the same time as it is the only aspiration worthy of the man.

This critic intransigent appears a skinned poet. The Flowers of the evil where esthetics crosses the mystic runs up against the Occidental culture. The lawsuit counteracts this aggression: it is things about which one does not speak in poetry. These are those of which all the modern literature is nourished: pleasure, especially when it are turbid and bitter, perversity, the hatred of oneself and others, the spleen which dig in the being the increasingly painful conscience of itself and which represent with the eyes of a company which is claimed Christian the supreme fault, since to despair is to doubt God.

Towards symbolism

In this universe tormented, where only weak lights - but soft then, lights of tenderness filter, the setting ones, memory especially, where even the spleen is made melancholy -, only residence the marvellous alchemy of art against nothing. Art of Baudelaire is a mixture successful of romanticism and formalism, but nourished of a too intense emotion so that the Flowers of the evil fall into the shelf from art for Article If there remains “traditional” (the worms is generally the alexandrine, the quatrains are with rhymes punts, the sonnet finds the second youth here), Baudelaire is resolutely modern by the place which he assigns with imagination, queen of faculties, in the search of the poetic beauty: this constructive imagination makes it possible to the poet to find the infallible one, the single one, who will be the durable means of exorcizing the anguish resulting from the multiplicity of the world. Because all things in the universe are answered (it is the famous mystical theory of the correspondences), poetry is the mistress of the symbols and it gives to the man the means of exceeding the reality in surreal which even returns bearable reality to him. Is there thus a safety, by the poetry, which goes until the unknown (“hell or sky, which imports? ”). For the tortured Christian conscience of Baudelaire, the only conciliation will be that of art and the aspiration to holiness: “Like a perfect chemist and a holy heart”, such is the poet.

Poetry in prose

In its last collection, the Spleen of Paris (still entitled Small Prose poems), Baudelaire had the intuition that the prose poem was the future form of poetry. If “small romantic” then little known, Aloysius Bertrand, had provided the foundations of them, and if Rimbaud and Mallarmé completed to give him established among in literature, Baudelaire found, in certain texts of the Spleen of Paris, the means of a strongly poetic unit, in the discontinuity even of the fragments. Death, early come, stopped its research.

The first undoubtedly, Baudelaire made poetry with what about it appeared deprived: modern life, unbearable, relentless, and consequently poetic par excellence since the beauty, always double, is precisely born from the crack and the fault. It has, according to the terrible word of Huysmans, “deciphered in the hieroglyphs of the heart the return of age of the feelings and the ideas”, and of all this mud, with words, it made gold.