Notes On Baudelaire

Baudelaire would not have been Baudelaire without Romanticism, but Modernism would not be Modernism without the poet, whose thinking was profoundly shaped by the difficult years leading up to 1848. [50]

Correctness of form is not in itself beauty, for as Baudelaire affirms in his diaries, "what is not slightly misshapen seems insensitive, from which it follows that irregularity, that is, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part of beauty and characteristic of it" (OC, I, p. 656). [55]

Drawn to Delacroix for his energetic depictions of contemporary as well as mythological and historical themes and for his intense use of color to suggest not just shape but also mood, Baudelaire found in him a hero who always remained somewhat aloof, but from whom he would cull a series of ideas that were central to his thinking. [61]

However little he has in common with earlier French Romantics like Hugo and Lamartine, Baudelaire would continue to see himself as an "old Romantic." But to understand that claim we need to understand that what he saw as Romanticism was above all an intensely felt and powerfully expressed response to the modern world, seized in all its transience, color and complexity. [68]

Art, Baudelaire argues, is a device for remembering beauty (OC, II, p. 455) and he clarifies his statement by affirming that mere imitation spoils beauty by failing to transform it through the filtering power of the artist's personality. This becomes particularly clear in regard to portrait painting, which Baudelaire says can be understood either as history or as a novel, by which he means either as a truthful representation of an external, if idealized, truth or an imaginative reconstruction of inner truth. [71]

Revealing individuals against the background that shapes them, either physically or metaphorically, is one of [Baudelaire's] skills... [72]

The word Baudelaire used for his feelings in early 1848 was intoxication, ivresse, a term he would take up in a prose poem in which he urges his readers, if they do not want to be the martyred slaves of time, to remain always intoxicated, on wine, poetry, or virtue as they choose.
[77]

--From Charles Baudelaire by Rosemary Lloyd, London: Reaktion Books, 2008.