Charles Baudelaire

Charles Pierre Baudelaire (9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poet, writer, and art critic who wrote a number of noteworthy works. His poems show mastery of rhyme and rhythm, have an exoticism acquired from the Romantics but are based on real-life observations.

Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), his most renowned work, is a collection of lyric poetry that reflects the changing nature of beauty in quickly industrializing Paris during the mid-nineteenth century. Baudelaire's very innovative prose-poetry approach impacted a whole generation of poets, including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. He is attributed to coining the word modernity (modernité) to describe the transient, ephemeral experience of living in a city, as well as creative expression's obligation to preserve that experience.