Baudelaire and the Art of Memory

Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) occupies an elevated position in French literature as both a critic and a poet of rare distinction. This study is an examination of the writer's art criticism and its relationship with his creative writing. It is the first book in English to treat in one volume the diverse aspects of the subject: the principal aesthetic ideas, the importance of the painters Delacroix, Boudin, Meryon, Guys, and Manet, Baudelaire's essays on laughter and caricature, as well as the language and rhetoric of the Salons and other critical writings.