Charles Baudelaire: “I don’t feel I have a vocation for anything.”

Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire | Pic credit to Wikimedia commons

Art critic, essayist, and French poet Charles Baudelaire (9April 1821–31 Aug 1867) the one who gained mastery in the world of rhyme from the romanticism. His rhymes are mostly exotic. However, Charles’s work mostly based on realism. Moreover, looking at his poetry, the most of the poets and their generation influenced by the work of Baudelaire.

Poem: Autumn by Charles Baudelaire

Soon we shall plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, vivid brightness of our short-lived summers!
Already I hear the dismal sound of firewood
Falling with a clatter on the courtyard pavements.

All winter will possess my being: wrath,
Hate, horror, shivering, hard, forced labor,
And, like the sun in his polar Hades,
My heart will be no more than a frozen red block.

All atremble I listen to each falling log;
The building of a scaffold has no duller sound.
My spirit resembles the tower which crumbles
Under the tireless blows of the battering ram.

It seems to me, lulled by these monotonous shocks,
That somewhere they're nailing a coffin, in great haste.
For whom? — Yesterday was summer; here is autumn
That mysterious noise sounds like a departure […]

Charles never been independent throughout his life. He always asked his mother for money. Therefore, the travellers becomes more acquainted with the real life. They watch people and their culture. Thus, Baudelaire had that madness of looking at the life of others into a deep sense of culture and curiosity. His stepfather once sent to one of the holiest places on the earth, India. To have his to get the rid of his sultry habits. Visiting India him get the free of dissolute habits.

Therefore, it did not turn out that expected. However, it helped him strongly into his career of literature. He learnt culture, people, and realism from India. Furthermore, read The Great. Travel of Xuanzang to India searching for Faith. Baudelaire was fond of sexual attraction. He dared to live with a prostitute as well as had a mistress in his life.

… If rape or arson, poison or the knife
Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff
Of this drab canvas, we accept as life—
It is because we are not bold enough!

(Roy Campbell's translation)

Also read: Who said Deaf can’t write constructive? Most of the deaf unable to being creative, however, George Evans did his best in poetry read George Evans & his Creative nous who had gained national fame in poetry.