Calm the Frick Down, Charles Baudelaire!

I was doing a Google image search to find a friendly portrait of French poet Charles Baudelaire, and here's what I found...

Dear Lord! Intense gaze! Grim expression! Poetic ennui levels off the charts! Maybe

if we pull back, things will look a bit more cheerful... 

Nope... still pretty bleak... Maybe another photographer can mellow this poet the frick out... 

Nope... still profoundly intense. He's staring into my very soul!

Of course, I would expect any less from the man who brought us the poem collection The Flowers of Evil. 

Not to be confused with the evil flowers from Little Shop of Horrors.

The reaction to Baudelaire's 1857 publication of Flowers of Evil? Critics and the public were shocked and appalled. (Which meant that everyone wanted to read it.

Here's his lover... Jeanne Duval...

 

Baudelaire's Number One American influence: 

Edgar Allan Poe: Another Master of the Hard Stare

He also seems to be influenced by this romantic poet... 

Isn't it Byronic?