“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”

French poet, essayist, translator and art critic

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, essayist, translator, and art critic. He is remembered for poetry that combines formal skill with a distinctly modern sensibility, and for work that helped shape literary tastes in 19th-century France. His poems are noted for their command of rhythm and rhyme, their Romantic inheritance, and their grounding in close observation of everyday life. That blend gives his writing both musical precision and a vivid sense of the world as it is seen and lived.