Symbolism and the Birth of Modernism

Charles Baudelaire's poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal ('The Flowers of Evil,' 1857) is widely regarded as a bridge between Romanticism and the Symbolist movement that followed. Prosecuted for offense to public morals in the same year as Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the collection explores beauty, decadence, and the alienation of modern urban life, developing in poems such as 'Correspondances' a theory of hidden correspondences between the sensory world and deeper spiritual meanings. Baudelaire's figure of the flâneur, the detached urban wanderer observing the modern city, became a lasting influence on later literary treatments of metropolitan experience.