Charles Baudelaire

The nineteenth century was famous for breaking with tradition and for the setting of trends. Land mark innovations occurred in industry, politics and society. The literary giants of the day waxed poetic and prosaic as they charged the populace with a fevered call to return to the values of the past and the pastoral. Poets and novelists cried out to their audiences to return to nature and to once again revel in the sublime.

Conversely, Charles Baudelaire pioneered a new form of poetic expression with anti-romantic sentiments and dark views on sex and death. This darkness is echoed in his drug laden and pathetic personal life. This paper will discuss Baudelaire's themes of depression, sexual deviance, and drug use and delineate some of the parallels within the writer's life and lifestyle.

Depression

Charles Baudelaire was born to an elderly former priest turned civil servant, Francois Baudelaire and his much younger wife Caroline. Francois died when Charles was only six and Caroline remarried swiftly the following year. Charles' new step-father was a career military man who sought to provide a proper education for his new son at a respectable boarding school. Loneliness and isolation suffered during his educational exile are reflected in the adolescent Baudelaire's correspondence with his parents.

This early sense of isolation is echoed in a latter letter to his mother in the spring of 1861. In a biography entitled Baudelaire the Damned by F. W. J. Hemmings, there is a particularly telling phrase which in very few words, volumes of profound emptiness are recorded.