Charles Baudelaire seems to have foreseen his early and unpleasant death after a depraved and brutal life when he wrote “I believe that my life was damned right from the beginning, and that it is so forever.”
His collection of poetry The Flowers of Evil outraged readers, was publicly condemned and became an epithet for criminality and perversion. However, this collection is the product of genius and predicts the direction of 20th century poetry.
Due to his conviction of the inseparable nature of beauty and evil, Baudelaire explored the peculiar charm of a decaying carcass, and with elegant subtlety, many of his poems probe the beauty of the perverse, macabre, and monstrous. Ridiculed throughout his life for his idiosyncrasies, his later work is enmeshed with a voracious pessimism.
