How Did Charles Baudelaire Pursue Happiness

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The fifth article in chapter three of our text Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew Parfitt and Dawn Skorczewski, presents Stefan Klein’s “Enjoyment.” When writing of the natural opiates produced within the brain, he brings up the French poet Charles Baudelaire. The excerpts from the poem “But get drunk” and the mention of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) and the fact that it was considered scandalous had me wanting to know more about his life, his works and his impact on the world. Charles Baudelaire was born the only son of François Baudelaire and Caroline Defayis on April 9th, 1821 in Paris France. His father was a painter and poet of moderate capability, and so he exposed his son to the arts, and he took to them with a passion. …show more content…

He was prone to bouts of great depression and despair, the greatest of witch come from his debts (“Charles,” Poetry, “Charles,” Encyclopedia). Four women were important to Charles in his life, Caroline his mother, Jeanne a sensual, passionate, exciting mistress, Apollonie, a woman of the word who Baudelaire had a platonic affection for, and Marie, an actress of substantial beauty and one great success. They would inspire his poetry and become almost mythical in it (Poggenburg, “Introduction to: Charles Baudelaire: Une Micro-Histoire”). In the last seventeen months of his life a stroke reduced him to an incoherent expression of himself, and it was not until after his death that his complete works was published (“Charles,” …show more content…

He brought Poe’s to France, he inspired not just poets but painters as well. Seemed to predict the impressionist style a decade before the actual emergence of it in his “Salon de 1859” and “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” (“The Painter of Modern Life”) (“Charles,” Encyclopedia). His foresight when writing on art was tremendous. The work of Baudelaire is a link between romanticism and modernism through both his life and his work. He was a catalyst for the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Algernon Charles Swinburne in the 19th century, and for Paul Valéry, Rainer Maria Rilke, and T. S. Eliot in the 20th century. He was pivotal in European literature and thought, from the Encyclopedia Britannica information this caused a move away from the romantic poetry of statement and emotion to the modern poetry of symbol and suggestion. These where the things that broadened our notions of what poetry could be, not just beautiful and sweet, but gritty and real (Poggenburg, “Introduction to: Charles Baudelaire: Une

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