Charles Baudelaire: A Study
1920
Charles Baudelaire: A Study, published in 1920 by Arthur Symons, is a critical examination of the life and work of the influential 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire. The book explores Baudelaire's complex personality, artistic genius, and the themes present in his poetry, particularly in 'Les Fleurs du Mal.' Symons delves into Baudelaire's struggles with love and despair, offering insights into the dualities of his existence and the aesthetics of his writing, which reflect the contradictions of beauty and darkness in a modern urban context.
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“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.””
— Arthur Symons
“La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas."()””
— Arthur Symons
“Be always drunken.Nothing else matters:that is the only question.If you would not feelthe horrible burden of Timeweighing on your shouldersand crushing you to the earth,be drunken continually.Drunken with what?With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.But be drunken.And if sometimes,on the stairs of a palace,or on the green side of a ditch,or in the dreary solitude of your own room,you should awakenand the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you,ask of the wind,or of the wave,or of the star,or of the bird,or of the clock,of whatever flies,or sighs,or rocks,or sings,or speaks,ask what hour it is;and the wind,wave,star,bird,clock will answer you:"It is the hour to be drunken!””
— Arthur Symons
“I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.””
— Arthur Symons
“What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?””
— Arthur Symons
“It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not.””
— Arthur Symons
“Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom””
— Arthur Symons
“The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.””
— Arthur Symons
“The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses. [...] The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. [...] What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire...to the unexpected as it comes along, the stranger as he passes.””
— Arthur Symons
