“The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.”

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.