r the Parisian journals;
articles that at the time passed unperceived, but which to-day furnish
perhaps the best evidences of that keen artistic insight and foresight
of the poet, which was at once his greatest good and evil genius. In
1856 appeared his translation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe; a
translation which may be said to have naturalized Poe in French
literature, where he has played a role curiously like that of Baudelaire
in Poe's native literature. The natural predisposition of Baudelaire,
which fitted him to be the French interpreter of Poe, rendered him also
peculiarly sensitive to Poe's mysteriously subtle yet rankly vigorous
charms; and he showed himself as sensitively responsive to these as he
had been to the exotic charms of the East. The influence upon his
intellectual development was decisive and final. His indebtedness to
Poe, or it might better be said, his identification with Poe, is visible
not only in his paradoxical manias, but in his poetry, and in his
theories of art and poetry set forth in his various essays and fugitive
prose expressions, and notably in his introduction to his translations
of the American author's works.

In 1857 appeared the "Fleurs du Mal" (Flowers of Evil), the volume of
poems upon which Baudelaire's fame as a poet is founded. It was the
result of his thirty years' devotion to the study of his art and
meditation upon it. Six of the poems were suppressed by the censor of
the Second Empire. This action called out, in form of protest, that fine
appreciation and defense of Baudelaire's genius and best defense of his
methods, by four of the foremost critics and keenest artists in poetry
of Paris, which form, with the letters from Sainte-Beuve, de Custine,
and Deschamps, a precious appendix to the third edition of the poems.

The name 'Flowers of Evil' is a sufficient indication of the intentions
and aim of the author. Their companions in the volume are: 'Spleen and
Ideal,' 'Parisian Pictures,' 'Wine,' 'Revolt,' 'Death.' The simplest
description of them is that they are indescribable. They must not only
be read, they must be studied repeatedly to be understood as they
deserve. The paradox of their most exquisite art, and their at times
most revolting revelations of the degradations and perversities of
humanity, can be accepted with full appreciation of the author's meaning
only by granting the same paradox to his genuine nature; by crediting
him with being not only an ardent