Charles Baudelaire

Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was born on 9 April 1821 and spent his life watching Paris tear itself apart and rebuild. His book of lyric poetry, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), caught the changing nature of beauty in a city being gutted by Haussmann's renovation — the fleeting, dirty, electric experience of life in an urban metropolis. He coined the term "modernity" to name that experience and the artist's duty to capture it. His prose-poetry and mastery of rhythm influenced Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé; Marshall Berman later called him the first Modernist. He die…