This year marks the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Baudelaire, creator of Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] — a collection of lyrical poems that still shock and thrill — and the avant-garde prose poems that are strikingly modern in content and style.
Born in Paris in the spring of 1821, Baudelaire lived for only 46 years, and that too in deep anguish and constant pain. Perhaps not ignored but less appreciated during his lifetime — when Victor Hugo overshadowed the literary landscape in both prose and verse — Baudelaire’s pre-eminence among the French poets was incrementally established as time passed.
Eighty years after his death, Joseph M. Bernstein wrote in his editorial introduction of Baudelaire’s translations in English, published from the United States: “... an inexorable self-analyst and explorer of subconscious in poetry, a creator of images that fire the senses, quicken the heart and illumine the mind, Baudelaire has few if any peers in the roll-call of modern poets.”