Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was born in Paris to a father who died when he was six and a mother who remarried a stern military officer the boy despised. He squandered a modest inheritance on a lavish bohemian lifestyle, contracted the syphilis that would eventually kill him, and spent much of his adult life in poverty, debt, and opium-tinged despair. Yet from this wreckage he produced a body of work that remade Western poetry. The Flowers of Evil, first published in 1857 and revised in 1861, was his only collection of verse, but it was enough to change everything. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by The Flowers of Evil.