French · 1821–1867
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, essayist and art critic. Born in Paris in 1821, he lost his father young and clashed with his stepfather, a military officer. He spent his inheritance quickly and lived much of his life in debt. His one book of verse, Les Fleurs du mal (1857), led to a prosecution for offending public morals, and six poems were banned. He also translated Edgar Allan Poe into French, wrote Le Spleen de Paris, a collection of prose poems, and published sharp criticism of the Salons and of painters such as Delacroix and Manet. In his essay The Painter of Modern Life he described the modern city and the walker in its crowds. His work shaped Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and the Symbolists, and later modernist poets. He suffered a stroke in 1866 that left him partly paralysed and unable to speak, and he died in Paris in 1867, aged 46.