Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire Poems

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who is also remembered as an art critic and essayist. He was part of the Decadent literary movement and his most famous work is a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal, or The Flowers of Evil. His style influenced many other important French writers like Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Read more about Charles Baudelaire.

Be Drunk

by Charles Baudelaire

‘Be Drunk’ by Charles Baudelaire is a stirring poem meant to incite the reader to passion about life.

This is a powerful prose poem from Charles Baudelaire that invokes much of the poet's invigorating spirit. A pioneer of the prose form that would become popular after his death, the poem underscores the evocative effect of marrying the prose structure with poetic flare. While also emphasizing Baudelaire's use of bold imagery and incessant repetition as a source of the poem's earnest will.

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

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