“Progress, this great heresy of decay.”

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.