The Poet Who Died for Our Sins

The figure of Baudelaire – dandy, rebel, enfant terrible, hysterical hypochondriac — compels such fascination that it’s almost possible to forget he wrote a few poems too. In fact, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a book-length critical study (Baudelaire, 1950) that barely took notice of a single poem. To Sartre, Baudelaire was not so much a poet as an episode in the history of consciousness. Suffice it to say that Sartre did not find in his protagonist a paragon of existentialist engagement. You can open the book almost at random and find such judgments as: “he was nothing but a gaping wound;” “his bad faith went so deep that he was no longer master of it;” “he never progressed beyond the stage of childhood;” “He was an eternal minor, a middle-aged adolescent who lived in a constant state of rage and hatred, but under the vigilant and reassuring protection of others.”