1821-1867.
His was a perverse nature, endowed with rare gifts which he
persistently abused. Pure physical sensation supplied a large part of
the material for his poetry, and among the senses it was especially
the one that has the remotest association with ideas that he drew upon
most constantly--the sense of smell. In his desperate search for new
and strange sensations he went the round of violent and exhausting
dissipations, and as his senses flagged he spurred them with all sorts
of stimulants. Meanwhile he observed himself curiously ; the result
in his poems is an impression of peculiarly wilful depravity. They
reflect his physical and mental experience, are always without
sobriety, often lacking in sanity. The title, _les Fleurs du mal_, is
both appropriate and suggestive; they invite no epithets so much as
"unhealthy" and "unwholesome."
He was extremely fond of Edgar A. Poe, and translated his works.
Works: _les Fleurs du mal_, 1857, new edition, 1861; _Oeuvres
posthumes_, 1887.
For reference : Gautier, _Portraits et souvenirs littéraires_;
E. Crépet, _Oeuvres posthumes et correspondance inédite de Ch.
Baudelaire, précédées d'une étude biographique_, 1887; Bourget,
_Essais de psychologie contemporaine_, 1883, F. Brunetière in _Revue
des Deux Mondes_, Sept. 1st, 1892; Henry James, _French Poets and
Novelists_, London, 1884; George Saintsbury, _Miscellaneous Essays_,
London, 1892.
The poems given here are all from _les Fleurs du mal_.
221. 19. BOUCHER; François Boucher (1703-1770) was a painter of
pastoral and genre subjects.