Charles Baudelaire: the debauchee’s debauchee

A privileged, arrogant poet who produced only one collection, Baudelaire has had huge influence in many spheres – and it continues 150 years after his death

Pioneer poète maudit Drug-addicted, syphilitic, always in debt despite inheriting a fortune, writing about prostitutes, hanging out in Paris’s demi-monde, forced by judges to suppress some of his poems – Baudelaire set the bar high for future artists of all types keen to be “maudit” (cursed) outsiders too. Yet subsequent generations have done their best to mimic him, with the YBAs the most recent instance of hell-raising hedonism for art’s sake.

Symbolist standard-bearer Symbolist writers across Europe took Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal as their inspiration as the 19th century turned into the 20th, and for some symbolism mutated into modernism. Eliot significantly borrows twice from him in The Waste Land (“hypocrite lecteur” is arguably its best phrase): poetry taking the contemporary city as its subject, as the French poet had demanded, but going beyond him in being formally radical too.