Authors

French · 1821–1867

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet whose Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) — prosecuted for obscenity on publication — transformed European poetry and launched the Symbolist movement. His translations of Edgar Allan Poe introduced Poe to European literature and shaped the French understanding of the American writer. He was among the first critics to seriously engage with modern painting, and his essays on Delacroix and Manet are essential documents of nineteenth-century art criticism. He died of syphilis and the aftermath of a stroke at forty-six, partly paralyzed and unable to speak.