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French · 1821-1867 · 21 quotes
French · 1821–1867
21 quotes in our collection
Charles Baudelaire was the French poet whose collection Les Fleurs du Mal — The Flowers of Evil — published in 1857, inaugurated modern poetry in French and Baudelaire was promptly prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy. Born in Paris in 1821, he spent his inheritance on books and art and drugs, translated Edgar Allan Poe into French with an understanding that amounted to kinship, and produced a body of criticism that remains the most acute account of what it feels like to be alive in a modern city. His poems are about boredom, beauty, sin, and the search for a transcendence that keeps failing to arrive. Inspiration comes of working every day, he wrote — the discipline of a man who otherwise squandered everything. He died in 1867 at forty-six, having spent his last year unable to speak, in a nursing home in Paris.
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