By Emanuel Vasconcelos Torres

Charles Pierre Baudelaire

Was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art
critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.
His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil),
expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing
Paris during the 19th century.
He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernit) to
designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban
metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

The principal themes of sex and death were considered
scandalous. He also touched on lesbianism, sacred and
profane love, metamorphosis, melancholy, the corruption of
the city, lost innocence, the oppressiveness of living, and
wine.
Baudelaire had much in common with Poe (who died in 1849
at age forty). The two poets display a similar sensibility of
the macabre and supernatural turn of mind; each struggled
with illness, poverty, and melancholy.

Love
"There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from
which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be 'two'. The man of
genius wants to be 'one'... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose
oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls 'the need to love'.


Pleasure
"Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the
certainty of doing 'evil'and men and women know from birth that all
pleasure lies in evil. But what matters an eternity of damnation to one
who has found an infinity of joy in a single second?


The Public
"In this regards, my friend, you're like the public, to whom one should
never offer a delicate perfume. It exasperates them. Give them only
carefully selected garbage."