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Baudelaire 1821 - 1867 (46)

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.


QUOTES

Be Drunk

Always be drunk.
That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
Get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"

Charles Pierre Baudelaire (Paris, April 9, 1821 - August 31, 1867) was a French poet, born in Paris, when his father was sixty and his mother twenty-six years old. His father was an educated man, devoted to the ideals of the Enlightenment and amateur painter. He died in 1827 and his mother remarried the following year to colonel Opic. Charles never forgave her for that, since Opic was the exact opposite of his artist father. After completing his studies in Paris and Lyon decided to live his life on the contrary of traditional bourgeois values that embody his mother and his stepfather.

In 1841 he travels to India to seek his fortune, he didn’t stay long. He returned in 1842 and met Jeanne Duval (the Black Venus of his poems), a young mulatto, who will introduce him to the pleasures and wounds of unbridled passion. Baudelaire spent the inheritance from his father to alcohol and women while he was writing poetry, discovered and translated Poe and worked as a journalist and art critic; he took a critical stance towards the grand forms of romance. In 1848 he participated in the revolution of the barricades, it was said that urged the rebels to shoot his stepfather. Later, along with Flaubert and Hugo expressed his opposition to the government of Napoleon III. In 1857 his “Flowers of Evil” were published, Baudelaire, the publisher and the printer were successfully prosecuted for creating an offense against public morals. They were fined but Baudelaire was not imprisoned. The newspaper Le Figaro of July 5, 1857 wrote about: "In some respects we doubt for the sanity of Mr. Baudelaire. But some others do not allow us for further doubts. Everything in his book which is not hideous is incomprehensible”. A hundred years it will take for “Flower” to be published freely and without restrictions. Of his most important works, other than “Flowers of Evil”, is the "Artificial paradises" and "The Melancholy of Paris'. Throughout his projects he tried to reconcile the beauty with evil, violence with pleasure, pain with joy; he wrote poems of melancholy, nostalgia, seriously and sassy. He suffered severe criticism, few of his contemporaries understood him, now is recognized as a great poet of French and world literature.

In 1864 Baudelaire went to Brussels where he wrote a pamphlet in which he caricatured the French bourgeoisie. He had wasted at the time all of his property and lived for two years in poverty and misery. In 1866, they brought him back to Paris with whole paralysis. He died after fifteen months in August 1867.