Appreciation …

… Baudelaire’s Modernism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull,)

Baudelaire’s great achievement was to break the hold of Romanticism, though he was, by nature, a romantic. He created a new poetic style and sensibility that rejected the empty gestures of late Romanticism without losing its heroic energy. He wrote about modern city life from a realistic perspective in ways that endowed it with sinister beauty and mystery. He fashioned a new vocabulary of images to describe the modern metropolis. His new verbal and visual idiom allowed poets to write about a complex urban world different from the pastoral landscapes of traditional poetry.