Baudelaire: quotes and more

His principal contraries:

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

In other words: the binary opposition between
Le Spleen: a passing melancholy, without any apparent cause, a feeling of complete disgust. It is born from the failure of sensuality and a realistic awareness of death. l'ennui: boredom, le néant: nothingness.

and

l'Idéal: the infinite. Beauty.

His best poem not in our anthology: "Enivrez-vous" "Get Drunk". In French and English: http://poetry.eserver.org/enivrez-vous.html
"Enivrez-vous" beautifully read by French actor and singer Serge Ragianni http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq6BiaGuZ74&feature=related

Poetic principles:

• Create a modern and ideal art.

• Surprise: Irregularity, the unexpected, surprise, astonishment, are an essential part of beauty.

• Cultivate suggestive and powerful language.

Quotes about poetry and the dandy…

"If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force."

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

"Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem."

"Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place."

"Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections."

"The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it."

"You must shock the Bourgeois." (Il faut épater le bourgeois.)

"The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform."

"My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music."

"I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire."

"Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous."

"The dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror."

"What is art? Prostitution."

See related pages on aestheticism, Art for Art’s Sake and Decadence