France

Charles Baudelaire

1821–1867

Born in Paris in 1821, Baudelaire lost his father at six and lived as a poet, critic and translator, in debt and at odds with respectable society. Les Fleurs du mal (1857) was prosecuted for offending public morality; it finds poetry in the modern city, desire, boredom, decay and death, in the tension between the ideal and the spleen. He made modernity itself poetic and stands at the threshold between Romanticism and modern poetry. He died in 1867.