Charles Pierre Baudelaire

Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821–67), French poet and critic, forerunner of the Symbolists. The poems in Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), with their probing of even the most bizarre sensations, outraged public opinion and led to the poet's being tried for obscenity. His later prose poems were posthumously published in Le Spleen de Paris (1869). He was also a critic of music and fine art, and was renowned for his translations of Edgar Allen Poe.