Renowned poet Charles Baudelaire played a significant role in introducing Edgar Allan Poe to French readers by publishing widely read criticisms and translations of Poe's writings. The two writers shared an appreciation for the exotic, a taste for morbid subjects, and a devotion to artistic purity. Baudelaire immersed himself in the study of English for the express purpose of doing justice to Poe's works, and his translations established his reputation in the French literary world well before the publication of his most famous book of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal. In the first part of this study, "Edgar Allan Poe, His Life and Works," Baudelaire sketches his subject's biography and discusses several representative writings. Two additional essays analyze Poe's literary theories and offer intriguing reflections of Baudelaire's own sense of aesthetics. The compilation concludes with a critical miscellany of several other prefaces and notes on the American author and his works.

Spine title: Writings on art & artists Includes bibliographical references.

Translated articles illustrating the development of Baudelaire's critical ideas.

A selection of the 19th-century French poet's most celebrated critical writings.

Charles Baudelaire, His Life is an autobiography by Charles Baudelaire. The author shares his life events, poetry, letters and essays in this extensive tome for lovers of lyricism.

Before publishing Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, Baudelaire was probably better known to his contemporaries as a critic than as a poet, and the articles translated here by P. E. Charvet illustrate the development of Baudelaire's critical ideas. The essays cover the visual, literary, and musical arts. From the early 'Salon' of 1846 Baudelaire's commitment to the cause of Delcroix was passionate and unswerving and it remains a theme of a number of these pieces. Baudelaire's literary criticism is represented by, amongst others, the two important articles on Poe, the spirited defence of Madame Bovary published shortly after Flaubert had been acquitted on a charge of offending public morality and the long article on Gautier, to whom Baudelaire dedicated Les Fleurs du Mal. The musician whom Baudelaire admired above all others was Wagner, and the article on Tannhäuser published at the time of the Paris production in 1861 shows his percipience as a critic: with no technical knowledge of music, Baudelaire nevertheless demonstrates an instinctive awareness of the magical power of suggestion in Wagner's music.

Although Edgar Allan Poe is most often identified with stories of horror and fear, there is an unrecognized and even forgotten side to the writer. He was a self-declared lover of beauty who “from childhood’s hour . . . [had] not seen / As others saw.” Poe and the Visual Arts is the first comprehensive study of how Poe’s work relates to the visual culture of his time. It reveals his “deep worship of all beauty,” which resounded in his earliest writing and never entirely faded, despite the demands of his commercial writing career. Barbara Cantalupo examines the ways in which Poe integrated visual art into sketches, tales, and literary criticism, paying close attention to the sculptures and paintings he saw in books, magazines, and museums while living in Philadelphia and New York from 1838 until his death in 1849. She argues that Poe’s sensitivity to visual media gave his writing a distinctive “graphicality” and shows how, despite his association with the macabre, his enduring love of beauty and knowledge of the visual arts richly informed his corpus.

Raser questions criticism's predilection for a scientific discourse, arguing that aesthetic categories are better indicators of a text's literary qualities. Although aesthetics has claimed subjective pleasure as its sole criterion since the time of Kant, aesthetic judgments tend always to ground themselves in logic or reference. In art criticism, description serves as this ground and is no more productive than in Baudelaire's art criticism, where it leads to poetry.