Recommendations

Books Like L'Art romantique

Best books to read after L'Art romantique by Baudelaire

Baudelaire's literary criticism collection (posthumous 1868) — essays on Poe, Hugo, Gautier, and his contemporaries, developing the theory of pure poetry and the correspondence between the arts. If this brilliant literary criticism fascinated you, these books explore similar territory.

  1. Curiosités esthétiques cover
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    Curiosités esthétiques

    by Charles Baudelaire

    The companion art criticism collection — the same aesthetic theory applied to painting rather than literature; reading both gives the complete Baudelairean aesthetic.

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  2. Les Fleurs du mal cover
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    Les Fleurs du mal

    by Charles Baudelaire

    The poetic practice — the theory of pure poetry that L'Art romantique develops in criticism is what Les Fleurs du mal embodies in verse; reading the criticism alongside the poetry is essential.

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  3. The Philosophy of Composition cover
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    The Philosophy of Composition

    by Edgar Allan Poe

    The Poe essay that Baudelaire develops and responds to — the theory that poetry must be constructed rationally, effect-first, rather than spontaneously inspired, is the foundation of both Poe's practice and Baudelaire's championing of him.

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  4. The Poetic Principle cover
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    The Poetic Principle

    by Edgar Allan Poe

    The companion Poe essay — the argument that poetry pursues pure beauty without moral intent is the theory that Baudelaire's 'Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe' develops into his own position.

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  5. Biographia Literaria cover
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    Biographia Literaria

    by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    Coleridge's critical theory — the English parallel to L'Art romantique, which develops a comparably ambitious theory of the imagination and the poet's function from a different philosophical tradition.

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  6. Émaux et Camées cover
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    Émaux et Camées

    by Théophile Gautier

    Gautier's most refined poetry — the work that embodies the theory of 'l'art pour l'art' (art for art's sake) that Baudelaire develops in his essay on Gautier; reading both shows the relationship between theory and practice.

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  7. 7

    La Renaissance

    by Walter Pater

    Pater's great English aesthetic criticism — the most direct continuation of the Baudelairean tradition in English, developing the theory of the correspondence between the arts and the pursuit of pure aesthetic experience.

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  8. Intentions cover
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    Intentions

    by Oscar Wilde

    Wilde's essays on aesthetics — the most playful development of the Baudelairean critical tradition in English, taking the theory of pure art and the artist's superiority to morality to its furthest comic and intellectual extreme.

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