Charles Baudelaire was the first modern poet.^[1] In both style and content, his provocative, alluring, and shockingly original work shaped and enlarged the imagination of later poets. His influence was not limited to France but spread across Europe and the Americas. His work guided the symbolist movement, which became the dominant school of modernist poetry, and inspired the Decadent and Aesthetic movements. Half a century later, his presence still haunted Surrealism. Nor was Baudelaire’s impact restricted to literature. His ideas on the autonomy of art, the alienation of the artist, the irrationality of human behavior, the intellectualization of poetry, the cult of beauty (and the beauty of evil), and the frank depiction of sexuality became central to modernist aesthetics. He also popularized less exalted cultural trends such as Satanism, sexual degradation, and the use of drugs for artistic inspiration. Not all of these ideas originated with Baudelaire, but his distinctive articulation of these principles became the lingua franca of international Modernism.

Baudelaire’s outsize impact is notable because his public career had such limited success during his short life.

Baudelaire’s outsize impact is notable because his public career had such limited success during his short life. Little read yet much misunderstood, he survived, just barely, on the margins of the literary world. He never commanded a large audience, though he achieved unwanted notoriety from an obscenity trial. By the time of his death in 1867, however, he had attracted a coterie of admirers who would guide the course