On Baudelaire's Aesthetic Literary Criticism

Baudelaire, a representative poet in the western modern literature history, provides much resource for academic research. Books and articles on Baudelaire are considerable both in China and abroad, most of which put emphasis on the interpretation of his poetry and Symbolist poetics. Aesthetic is an important part of Baudelaire's aesthetic thinking, but the research effort in this respect is far from adequate. This thesis intends to position his Aesthetic literary criticism in the coordinate of literature development, giving it a three-dimensional analysis from the respects of the shaping of his Aesthetic literary criticism, its components and its comprehensive evaluation. Baudelaire's Aesthetic literary criticism, taking the drastic social-culture change in 19th century as its background and kant's philosophy aesthetics as the theoretical foundation, did not remain constant. On the contrary, it shifted from utilitarianism to aestheticism under the influence of varied factors. Baudelaire put up a couple of aesthetic principles such as 'poetry has no purposes other than itself','the purpose of poetry is to dig up beauty out of evil','poetry should represent essential truth', and 'art is amoral'. This shows that his Aesthetic view on art stands in a dialectical relation with other literature and art views of his. Baudelaire's aesthetic literary criticism possesses all the common characteristic of Aestheticism and at the same time has its own uniqueness. He broken into the forbidden area set up by the classical anesthetists for the first time and put forward the creative principle, dig up beauty out of evil, which contributed much to Aestheticism and even the western literature history, and exerted a far-reaching influence on the whole Aesthetic Movement.