Birth of Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire was born on 9 April 1821 in former 11th arrondissement of Paris. A French poet and critic, Baudelaire is regarded as a founder of modern poetry. His only collection of verse, The Flowers of Evil, published in 1857, explored beauty in decay, urban life and sensual experience, and led to a prosecution for offending public morals, resulting in fines and the suppression of six poems. He also wrote prose poems collected in Paris Spleen, art criticism, and an influential essay, The Painter of Modern Life, and he translated the works of Edgar Allan Poe into French. His ideas about the modern city and the observer, the flâneur, shaped later writers and Symbolist poets. He died in Paris after years of illness and debt.

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