Baudelaire, Bicentennial

 The sheer luminous gown

                           The fountain wears

             Where Phoebe’s very own

                           Color appears

             Falls like a summer rain

                           Or shawl of tears.

—Charles Baudelaire, from ‘The Fountain’ (1857), tr. by Anthony Hecht and pub. in Poetry magazine Sept. 2011. (Orig. pub. in Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’,’ as ‘Le Jet d’eau’).

Charles Baudelaire was born on this day, 200 years ago, in 1821 (d. 1867). Baudelaire was a significant poet and precursor to the Symbolist movement in French poetry, influencing Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, among others.

Baudelaire is known for his startling lyricism and coining of the term “modernity” (modernité), in the sense of “modern art,” the tone and form of which find expression in his prose poems, which have been influential ever since the mid-19th century. Baudelaire, for whom the poet “is a kinsman in the clouds,” better adapted to the sky than the ground. Baudelaire also was among the first translators of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, itself a measurably modern move.

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Image: Danaida fountain of Peterhof, photo by Yair Haklai (2008) and posted at Wikimedia Commons.