The Albatross

Baudelaire’s poetry is difficult to place within a single poetic movement because his work drew from the history of literature while radically pushing against poetic tradition. On one hand, he was a classical poet who adhered to formal prosodic conventions in pursuit of an ideal beauty, but on the other hand, he was a Romanticist who revolted against conventional morality. This is why Baudelaire is sometimes referred to as the last Romantic poet and the harbinger of Modernist poetry, making him a pivotal figure in French and world literature.

Baudelaire wrote in the mid-19th century, when Romanticism—with its emphasis on emotion, subjective experience, and nature—was still a powerful literary ideal. However, the poet’s early career witnessed the advent of the Parnassian poetry movement in France. This movement emphasized refinement, formal elegance, and objective description instead of the emotional outpourings of Romanticism. Parnassianism’s attention to technical perfection and formal restraint had a significant impact on Baudelaire, whose poems demonstrate precision, often using the sonnet and other classical forms.

Nonetheless, Baudelaire did not completely succumb to the refining impulse of the Parnassian movement. His work pushed against the purely descriptive in favor of poems of a more metaphysical nature. In his efforts to pierce beyond the physical world by reaching for the ineffable essence of reality, he inaugurated the Symbolist movement of French poetry. The Symbolists used vivid imagery and associative language in pursuit of metaphysical truths. They prized the human imagination—which Baudelaire viewed as the poet’s greatest power—over nature, signaling a shift away from Romanticism and toward Aestheticism and Decadence, turn of the 20th century movements that touted “art for art’s sake,” in English author Oscar Wilde’s famous phrase. Baudelaire and many of the Symbolist poets who followed his example became known as “poètes maudits,” meaning accursed poets, a critical term that highlighted the outsider status of the poet in bourgeois society.

Baudelaire’s far-reaching influence can be found in the Symbolist works of 19th century poets Gérard de Nerval, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé; the poetry of the French Surrealists; and the Modernist poetry of 20th century English writers such as T.S. Eliot.