let's talk about judging ugliness first. Aesthetic appreciation of ugliness began in France. After experiencing the imperial era in the late 18th century, France gradually became barren and lost confidence. The Enlightenment not only liberated people's minds, but also brought inevitable disadvantages afterwards, and poetry fell into an artificial abyss. At the end of the 18th century, the French philosophical circles started to criticize the Enlightenment, which generally appeared in French politics, philosophy, literature and art and other fields. Among them, literary life enters people's inner world in the most warm and favorable way. So romanticism was born. Hugo believes that this alternation between the old and the new is a historical necessity, and the emergence of new literature-romantic literature is also inevitable.
schlegel, a later master of aestheticism, thinks that the highest goal of modern poetry is not necessarily beauty, while Hugo thinks that true romanticism is freedom in literature. He strongly criticizes the only rule of classicism, and thinks that the content of artistic expression should be expanded, and artistic expression should be passionate and true feelings, and ugliness and struggle should also enter the artistic field. Therefore, ugliness no longer exists as an accessory of beauty, and ugliness begins to be independent and shine. In Hugo's view, beauty and ugliness exist in modern society. The situation in which ugliness is belittled and ugliness sets off beauty can no longer meet the essential requirements of today's literature and art. The task of creators and artists is to express the true features of the whole world. One of the representative works of his theory is Notre Dame de Paris. In the original text of Notre Dame de Paris, although quasimodo was hated by the world for his ugly appearance, his heart was very kind, so he was regarded as the best standard of morality in Hugo's novels. Hugo's revolutionary literary theory and innovation brought Baudelaire a profound influence, and also created Baudelaire's own style to a great extent.
Later, Hugo's works were loved by the French people, and the traditional relationship between good and evil and beauty and ugliness was broken. Artists should be loyal to their feelings. Aestheticism has long been a mirage. The aesthetic ideal and paradigm centered on beauty are all expected by everyone, and no one is fascinated by it. However, human perceptual psychology has long been not only beautiful but also ugly. Facing the reality directly may be the only destination for modern people. In order to get spiritual salvation, it is imperative to appreciate ugliness, and the human spirit can really have strong essential power only in perceptual criticism such as appreciating ugliness.
Baudelaire's habit of corrupting and dilapidated images makes his poems strongly destructive. He has expressed his yearning for distorted and chaotic beauty and his fascination with the destruction of beauty more than once in his poetry creation and aesthetic works. Compared with the authenticity of the real world, Baudelaire yearns for the world of poetry, which is more real in his eyes. In his view, what poetry wants to express is "pure desire, touching melancholy and noble despair". In his poems, such as Ideal and carrion, it uses a lot of dark, heavy, erosive and chaotic images to create his unique aesthetic feeling. Baudelaire's beauty is satanic, functional but not obscene, and full of a strong sensory stimulation and emotional fluctuation. In his view, it is these "weird ingredients that make up and determine his personality, but without personality, there is no beauty", and he is always pursuing the extreme distortion and almost instantaneous. Later Eliot was also influenced by Baudelaire, not just Eliot, whose style directly influenced the existentialism in the 2th century. The intense negative criticism in his poems and the intense destructive atmosphere brought about by the discussion of nothingness not only presented a completely different beauty at that time, but also opened the door for many later creations with illusion and disillusionment. Therefore, of course, he can be celebrated in western poetry for hundreds of years.
In fact, Baudelaire is not only the West, but also deeply influenced the poetry of South America and the literary style of East Asia (mainly Japanese). Borges and Nie Luda were all inspired by him. Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Yukio Mishima and Kawabata Yasunari also present aesthetic tendencies similar to Baudelaire in their works. Akutagawa Ryunosuke also has the sentence "Life is not as good as Baudelaire's poem" (from A Fool's Life), and its influence can be seen. In essence, mourning for things, seclusion and idleness are the core of Japanese aesthetics, which is naturally close to Baudelaire's pessimistic, decadent, melancholy and destructive aesthetic thought. Yukio Mishima also said in "Golden Pavilion Temple" that "beauty and I are enemies, and everything that is extremely beautiful should be destroyed". It is also inseparable from the aesthetic appreciation of ugliness in Bo style.
Summary: Baudelaire's literary style is indeed heterogeneous. Only by combining his background can we clearly know the birth of this aesthetic appreciation of ugliness and the significance of Baudelaire's birth. In Bo's view, ugliness inevitably brings people pain or discomfort, but such pain is not disgusting. Ugliness has strong independence and artistic value. Ugliness does not have to become beauty to be discussed, and its existence is reasonable. It is precisely because of the existence of ugliness that the sensibility seems to be more gloomy and desperate, and it also makes the lyric poetry itself richer and more diverse, and it has developed into what it is today.