Baudelaire and the human condition

Abstract

This article aims to study the work of Charles Baudelaire, taking into account the reality within it, its historical moment and the society in which the poet lived. Through his presentation of Erick Auerbach's conception of Baudelaire's work, as opposed to Walter Benjamin's analysis of the author's work in order to address not only the work of the poet, but his importance to his time and his society. Through different interpretive methods, the authors painted the portrait of a poet who is essentially ambiguous, contradictory, whose poetry presents opposing instances that are not solved in any synthesis. Baudelaire, however, appears in both authors as a man of his time, both Auerbach and Benjamin tracing the outlook of a figure who was an example of the human condition of his time, subjected to the degradation imposed by bourgeois society, Baudelaire claims the dignity which is that of the human species itself.