Charles baudelaire essays

Like many writers before and after him, Baudelaire wrote without specific commission, on “spec” as it were. This essay on Constantin Guys, an illustrator for the Illustrated London News, was actually written in 1860 and would not be published until 1863 in installment form in Figaro.

Like Baudelaire, he, a “man of the crowd,” was a journalist who was trained to watch and look carefully, especially at the details, or what the poet described as, “particular beauty, the beauty of circumstances and the sketch of manners.”

Edgar Allan Poe. In 1847, Baudelaire became acquainted with the works of Poe, in which he found tales and poems that had, he claimed, long existed in his own brain but never taken shape. Baudelaire saw in Poe a precursor and tried to be his French contemporary counterpart.

Modern life, fueled by commodities and their artificial manufacture of artificial desires, is defined by a new and bewildering urban environment, populated by new kinds of people, the demimonde. Nothing is real and everything changes and, above all, nothing is natural.