Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821 - 1867) was a French poet who also 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. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.
Introduction
1. Extracts from the Salon of 1845
2. Extracts from the Salon of 1846
3. Of virtuous plays and novels
4. The universal exhibition of 1855: the fine arts
5. Of the essence of laughter and generally of the comic in the plastic arts
6. Edgar Allen Poe, his life and works
7. Further notes on Edgar Poe
8. Some French caricaturists
9. Some foreign caricaturists
10. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
11. Théophile Gautier
12. Extracts from the Salon of 1859
13. Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris
14. The life and work of Eugène Delacroix
15. The painter of modern life
Notes.
