THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE Like many writers before and after him, Baudelaire wrote without specific commission, on “spec” as it were. This essay on Constantin Guys, an illustrator for the Illustrated London News, was actually written in 1860 and would not be...
BAUDELAIRE AND MODERNITY Every age needs its observer and every era requires an interpreter. To elevate the culture above mere description, that individual has to be an odd cross between a poet and a reporter. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a renegade poet, a...
BAUDELAIRE AS ART CRITIC “We are going to be impartial. We have no friends—that is a great thing—and no enemies.” Thus Charles Baudelaire began his career as an art critic with the Salon of 1845. With a tone we suspect to be sardonic, the young writer...
As English speaking and English writing people, we tend to hear more about the brief American Experience in this war and we are familiar with the British anti-war poetry and the legend of the well-born and the well-bred, the flower of English manhood dying on the...
In 1919, the French poet and intellectual, Paul Valery, wrote two letters in which he contemplated the end of the Great War. In his website, The History Guide, Steven Kreis noted that these famous letters were actually of English origin: “The Crisis of the...
