Baudelaire is the most influential French poet of the last seventy years. Baudelaire has written poems that will, in all likelihood, live while poetry is used as a medium of expression, and the great influence that he has exercised on English and continental literature is mainly due to the particular quality of his style, his way of feeling or his method of thought. He is a master of analytical power, and in his highest ecstasy of emotional expression, this power can readily be recognized. In his own quotation he gave forth his philosophy on this point: "The more art would aim at being philosophically clear, the more will it degrade itself and return to the childish hieroglyphic: on the other hand, the more art detaches itself from teaching, the more will it attain to pure disinterested beauty. Poetry, under pain of death or decay, cannot assimilate Herself to science or ethics. She has not Truth for object, she has only Herself."
What appears at first glance in the preceding phrases to be a contradiction is really a confirmation of Baudelaire's conception of the highest understanding of aesthetic principle. Baudelaire's ideal beauty is tempered with mystery and sadness, the real too, but never the commonplace.
No poet has brought so many new ideas in sensation into a literary style. Intellectually he is all sensation, though he seldom degenerates into abstract sentimentality. This sum totality of the power of absorbing external sensation is Baudelaire.