Charles Pierre Baudelaire

[April 9, 1821 - August 31, 1867]

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French poet, essayist, and art critic. Coined the term modernity in reference to the transient nature of rapidly industrializing Paris - a reality he felt was the responsibility of the artist to accurately and unabashedly represent. Due to excessive use of narcotics he became wrapt in the throes of aphasia at the age of forty and able to utter only the phrase Crénom (or Holy Shit!) over the last two years of his life. His poem Out of the Depths (known colloquially as A Lake Cimmerian) is famously embedded in Alban Berg's's seminal cypherwork, the Lyric Suite:

Have pity, my one true lust nostalgic

Down to a dark abyss my heart has sounded,

A dystopian world by grey horizons bounded,

Where blaspheme horror swims a lake cimmerian.

A frigid sun floats overhead one six months,

the other six darkness wraps the metropolis;

a terrain more bleak than the polar wastes

Neither beasts, nor streams, nor verdure, nor woods.

But no horror in the world can surpass in dread

By the cold razor of this glacial sun

And that huge night like primal chaos spread

I envy the most putrid beast somnambulant

heart slowed near death in cave or coral gable,

So slowly an arc of these dark years do trace.