Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who worked as an essayist, art critic and translator.
40 Facts About Charles Baudelaire
2.
Charles Baudelaire coined the term modernity to designate the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience.
3.
Marshall Berman has credited Charles Baudelaire as being the first Modernist.
4.
Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris, France, on 9 April 1821, and baptized two months later at Saint-Sulpice Roman Catholic Church.
5.
Charles Baudelaire's biographers have often seen this as a crucial moment, considering that finding himself no longer the sole focus of his mother's affection left him with a trauma, which goes some way to explaining the excesses later apparent in his life.
6.
Charles Baudelaire began to run up debts, mostly for clothes.
7.
Charles Baudelaire's stepfather sent him on a voyage to Calcutta, India in 1841 in the hope of ending his dissolute habits.
8.
Charles Baudelaire's family obtained a decree to place his property in trust, which he resented bitterly, at one point arguing that allowing him to fail financially would have been the one sure way of teaching him to keep his finances in order.
9.
Charles Baudelaire became known in artistic circles as a dandy and free-spender, going through much of his inheritance and allowance in a short period of time.
10.
Charles Baudelaire's mother thought Duval a "Black Venus" who "tortured him in every way" and drained him of money at every opportunity.
11.
Charles Baudelaire took part in the Revolutions of 1848 and wrote for a revolutionary newspaper.
12.
Charles Baudelaire often moved from one lodging to another to escape creditors.
13.
Charles Baudelaire undertook many projects that he was unable to complete, though he did finish translations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe.
14.
Charles Baudelaire's first published work, under the pseudonym Baudelaire Dufays, was his art review "Salon of 1845", which attracted immediate attention for its boldness.
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In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote his second Salon review, gaining additional credibility as an advocate and critic of Romanticism.
16.
Charles Baudelaire's continued support of Delacroix as the foremost Romantic artist gained widespread notice.
17.
Charles Baudelaire next worked on a translation and adaptation of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
18.
Charles Baudelaire was productive and at peace in the seaside town, his poem Le Voyage being one example of his efforts during that time.
19.
Charles Baudelaire smoked opium, and in Brussels he began to drink to excess.
20.
Charles Baudelaire suffered a massive stroke in 1866 and paralysis followed.
21.
Charles Baudelaire is one of the major innovators in French literature.
22.
Charles Baudelaire's poetry is influenced by the French romantic poets of the earlier 19th century, although its attention to the formal features of verse connects it more closely to the work of the contemporary "Parnassians".
23.
Charles Baudelaire brought the city's details to life in the eyes and hearts of his readers.
24.
Charles Baudelaire was an active participant in the artistic life of his times.
25.
Charles Baudelaire was frank with friends and enemies, rarely took the diplomatic approach and sometimes responded violently verbally, which often undermined his cause.
26.
Charles Baudelaire's associations were numerous, including Gustave Courbet, Honore Daumier, Felicien Rops, Franz Liszt, Champfleury, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, and Balzac.
27.
In 1847, Charles Baudelaire became acquainted with the works of Poe, in which he found tales and poems that had, he claimed, long existed in his own brain but never taken shape.
28.
Charles Baudelaire saw in Poe a precursor and tried to be his French contemporary counterpart.
29.
Charles Baudelaire was not the first French translator of Poe, but his "scrupulous translations" were considered among the best.
30.
Charles Baudelaire absorbed much of Delacroix's aesthetic ideas as expressed in his journals.
31.
Charles Baudelaire had no formal musical training, and knew little of composers beyond Beethoven and Weber.
32.
Later, Charles Baudelaire put them into his non-technical analysis of Wagner, which was highly regarded, particularly his essay "Richard Wagner et Tannhauser a Paris".
33.
In gratitude for their friendship and commonality of vision, Charles Baudelaire dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to Gautier.
34.
Charles Baudelaire encouraged Manet to strike out on his own path and not succumb to criticism.
35.
Charles Baudelaire seems to me crushed and stunned by shock.
36.
When Charles Baudelaire returned from Belgium after his stroke, Manet and his wife were frequent visitors at the nursing home and she played passages from Wagner for Charles Baudelaire on the piano.
37.
Charles Baudelaire became interested in photography in the 1850s, and denouncing it as an art form, advocated its return to "its real purpose, which is that of being the servant to the sciences and arts".
38.
Charles Baudelaire wrote on a wide range of subjects, drawing criticism and outrage from many quarters.
39.
Marcel Proust, in an essay published in 1922, stated that, along with Alfred de Vigny, Charles Baudelaire was "the greatest poet of the nineteenth century".
40.
For Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire's importance lay in his anatomies of the crowd, of the city and of modernity.