Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire: Romantic, Parnassian, and Symbolist Often compared to the American poet Edgar Allen Poe, the French poet Charles Baudelaire has become well-known for his fascination with death, melancholy, and evil and his otherwise eccentric yet contemplative style. These associations have deemed him as a "patron saint of modernist poetry" while at the same time closely tying his style in with the turbulent revolutionary movements in France and Europe during the 19th century (Haviland, screens 5-10). By comparing three of his poems, "Spleen," "Elevation," and "To One Who Is Too Gay," from his masterpiece The Flowers of Evil, three evident commonalities can be found throughout the works in the influence that the three 19th-century styles of Romanticism, Parnassianism, and Symbolism had on his poetry. Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was born on April 9, 1821 in Paris, France to the parents of Francois Baudelaire and Caroline Defayis (Christohersen, Biography). It was his father, Francois, who taught Charles to appreciate the arts, because he was also a mildly talented poet and painter himself. In February 1827, Francois died when Charles was only six, after which Charles and his mother developed an extremely close relationship until she remarried in 1828 to Major Jacques Aupick (Veinotte; Christohersen, Biography). The family moved to wherever Aupick was posted for the military and Baudelaire began his education at the Collège Royal in Lyons, then transferred to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. It was at the latter that he began to write poetry and develop moods of depression, and in 1839 he was expelled for being unruly. Eventually he became a student of law at the Ecole de Droit but in reality lived a "free life" and it was here that he came into contact with the literary world for the first time. He also contracted VD, which was to be the cause of his death years later. Aupick, hoping to draw Baudelaire away from the lifestyle he was living,