Baudelaire is a masculine poet. He carved rather than sang; the plastic arts spoke to his soul. A lover and maker of images. Like Poe, his emotions transformed themselves into ideas. Bourget classified him as mystic, libertine, and analyst. He was born with a wound in his soul, to use the phrase of Père Lacordaire.
Recall Baudelaire’s prayer: ‘Thou, O Lord, my God, grant me the grace to produce some fine lines which will prove to myself that I am not the last of men, that I am not inferior to those I contemn.’ Individualist, egoist, anarchist, his only thought was letters. Jules Laforgue thus described Baudelaire: ‘Cat, Hindoo, Yankee, Episcopal, Alchemist.’ Yes, an alchemist who suffocated in the fumes he created. He was of Gothic imagination, and could have said with Rolla: ‘Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux.’ He had an unassuaged thirst for the absolute. The human soul was his stage, he its interpreting orchestra.
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