Charles Baudelaire
Les Fleurs du Mal — inventor of modern poetry
The poet who made beauty out of ugliness and inaugurated modern poetry. Les Fleurs du Mal — prosecuted for obscenity on publication — found the lyrical in the sordid, the sublime in the decadent, and changed what poetry could talk about. Every modern poet from Rimbaud to Eliot descends from him.
Key works
- Les Fleurs du Mal1857— Flowers of Evil — beauty extracted from corruption
- Paris Spleen1869— Prose poems — the city as labyrinth of sensation