"Modernité", its paradoxes and Charles Baudelaire

Abstract

Modernity can be approached according to its many faces: social, political, cultural and aesthetic – lines that sometimes criss-cross, and sometimes deny themselves, symptom of its many paradoxes. Though some German and French romantic authors have already anticipated it in some of its aspects, modernité, in the poetic fi eld, has as one of its major representative the poet well known as “the father of modernity”: Charles Baudelaire. This paper is a study about Baudelaire’s relationship with the concept of the aesthetic of modernity and its paradoxes that are always present in his poetic as well as in his critical work. Along the presentation, some poems from Les Fleurs du Mal will be focused. Keywords: Charles Baudelaire. Modernity. Aesthetic. Poetry. Lês Fleurs du Mal.