John Dugdale on Baudelaire's Enduring Influence

At The Guardian's Books blog, John Dugdale nods to the various sides of Charles Baudelaire, the French poet whose "influence continued into the 70s with Patti Smith and John Cooper-Clarke, until punk gave way to ... dandyism, another Baudelairean legacy." Dugdale pays careful attention to the ways that Baudelaire's influence has affected artists through the ages: "subsequent generations have done their best to mimic him, with the YBAs the most recent instance of hell-raising hedonism for art’s sake." Let's start there: 

Symbolist standard-bearer Symbolist writers across Europe took Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal as their inspiration as the 19th century turned into the 20th, and for some symbolism mutated into modernism. Eliot significantly borrows twice from him in The Waste Land (“hypocrite lecteur” is arguably its best phrase): poetry taking the contemporary city as its subject, as the French poet had demanded, but going beyond him in being formally radical too.

Role model for rock stars Feted by the Beats (along with Rimbaud) as the original urban stoned visionary, Baudelaire also became a hero to the singer-lyricists who succeeded them as counterculture stars in the 60s – Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison all drew on him, while Mick Jagger claimed that “Sympathy for the Devil” came from “my Baudelaire books”. His influence continued into the 70s with Patti Smith and John Cooper-Clarke, until punk gave way to ... dandyism, another Baudelairean legacy.

Importer-exporter As the translator of Poe’s detective, sci-fi, fantasy and horror stories, Baudelaire began France’s love affair with US pulp fiction, from Jules Verne (who was inspired to write by seeing those translations as a boy) to Camus devouring crime novels and the nouvelle vague’s championing of film noir – in each case, models that would be reworked with a Gallic twist (usually more philosophy, or just more talking) and sent back across the Atlantic.

Read on at The Guardian.