Quotes About Baudelaire

Baudelaire, ici encore, se montre beaucoup plus radical que Flaubert ; notamment à propos de George Sand : bête, lourde, bavarde, « elle a dans les idées morales la même profondeur de jugement […] que les concierges et les filles entretenues » ; « théologienne du sentiment », elle

The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.

Baudelaire was far more than a great poet. He established the keyboard of a sensibility that still lives within us, if we are not total brutes.

Soñé que Baudelaire hacía el amor con una sombra en una habitación donde se había cometido un crimen. Pero a Baudelaire no le importaba. Siempre es lo mismo, decía

Baudelaire had supper at the table next to ours. He was without a cravat, his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were to be guillotined. A single affectation: his little hands washed and cared for, the nails kept scrupulously clean. The face of a maniac, a voice that cuts like a knife, and a precise elocution that tries to copy Saint-Just and succeeds.

I like Baudelaire's sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

For Baudelaire, man's poetic fate is to be the mirror of immensity; or even more exactly, immensity becomes conscious of itself, through man. Man for Baudelaire is a vast being.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk.

Speaking of photography Baudelaire said: "This industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy." And in his own terms of reference Baudelaire was half right; certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards. The photographer must find new ways to make his meaning clear.

With Baudelaire, physiology entered into poetry; with Nietzsche, into philosophy. By them, the troubles of the organs were raised to song, to concept. With health the one thing proscribed, it was incumbent upon them to afford disease a career.

It would probably be quite easy to extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold Bennett did, from the blackness of the industrial towns; one can easily imagine Baudelaire, for instance, writing a poem about a slag-heap. But the beauty or ugliness of industrialism hardly matters.

Aimer les femmes intelligentes est un plaisir de pédéraste.

If Baudelaire, in hieroglyphics of the soul, had deciphered the return of the age of the sentiment and ideas, Poe, in the field of morbid psychology had more especially investigated the domain of the soul.

If Baudelaire had made out among the hieroglyphics of the soul the critical age of thought and feeling, it was Poe who, in the sphere of morbid psychology, had carried out the closest scrutiny of the will.

The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind. It is no accident that the contemplative Egyptians, together with such later poetic spirits as Poe, Gautier, Baudelaire, and Swinburne, were all sincere worshippers of the supple grimalkin.

Benjamin's aesthetic is dissectional, drawing on Baroque poetry, Baudelaire's writing and fashion histories. The female body becomes ornament, and in such fetishistic fragmentation, body parts are likened to alabaster, snow, jewels, minerals, and the body can, of course, be made equivalent to – that is, bought for – the metal of exchange: money.

The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One

The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves.

I talked this matter over with Douglas more than once. He did not know French well; but he could understand it and he was a rarely good translator as his version of a Baudelaire sonnet shows. In any dispute as to the value of a word or phrase I should prefer his opinion to Oscar's. But Ross is doubtless right on this point. F.H.]

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him a profound philosopher... Poe was much the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Wandering aimlessly, broken by my thoughts, Which slowly sharpened daggers at my heart