Baudelaire As Critic

How, Baudelaire asks, can we learn to see the beauty of products whose aesthetic codes are completely unknown to us? His answer is significant, in light of his own creative writing as well as for what it reveals about his refusal to be bound by conventions and prejudices. We need, he tells us, to transform ourselves by a phenomenon of will acting on the imagination, in order to be able to step into the milieu that has given birth to this "strange flowering" as he puts it (OC, II, p. 576). He acknowledges that few people possess this wonderful gift of cosmopolitanism, but suggests that we can all acquire it by setting preconceptions aside and letting ourselves be penetrated by new and different forms of beauty.

--Rosemary Lloyd, Charles Baudelaire (2008), pp. 100-101.