L'Art romantique Reading Order

Why did Baudelaire champion Edgar Allan Poe?

Baudelaire's championship of Poe — he translated Poe's stories into French across the 1850s and 1860s, and Poe's influence on French literature through Baudelaire's translations is enormous — was based on a set of identifications that were partly personal and partly theoretical. Personally, Baudelaire identified with Poe as a poet in exile in a philistine, commercial society that did not understand or value his work; Poe's poverty, his failure to achieve recognition, and his early death all corresponded to Baudelaire's own sense of his position in French literary culture. Theoretically, Baudelaire found in Poe the clearest articulation of his own aesthetic theory: Poe's argument in 'The Philosophy of Composition' and 'The Poetic Principle' — that poetry pursues beauty for its own sake, without moral or didactic intent, and that the pursuit of beauty is the highest human aspiration — is the theoretical position that Baudelaire himself holds and that Les Fleurs du mal embodies. Baudelaire also found in Poe's fiction the model of the controlled, rational creation of emotional effect — Poe's claim that 'The Raven' was composed entirely rationally, effect-first — which connects to Baudelaire's own emphasis on craft and control as the necessary complement to inspiration.