I am certain Baudelaire must have read the poems of John Keats; for there are certain characteristics in the versification, and in the using of images of both poets. Keats had something feminine and twisted in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves—which are utterly lacking in Baudelaire—but which it is now the fashion to call decadent; Keats being more than a decadent, but certainly decadent in such a line as—
"One faint eternal eventide of gems,"
which might have been written, in jewelled French, by Mallarmé. I give one of his sonnets, a perverse and perverted one, made by a fine technical feat out of two recurrent rhymes:
"Ses purs ongles très-haut dédiant leur onyx,
L'angoisse, ce minuit, soutient, lampadaphore,
Maint rêve vespéral brûlé par le Phénix
Que ne recueille pas de cinéraire amphore
Sur les crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx
Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore,
(Car le maître est allé puiser des fleurs au Styx
Avec ce seul objet dont le néant s'honore.)
Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or
Agonise selon peut-être le décor
Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe,
Elle, défunte nue en le miroir, encor
Que, dans l'oubli formé par le cadre, se fixe
De scintillations sitôt le septuor."
Keats luxuriates; like Baudelaire, in the details of physical discomfort, in all their grotesque horror, as when, in sleeplessness—how often these two overstrung and over-nervous poets must have had sleepless nights!—
"We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft,
And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil."
He is neo-Latin, again like Baudelaire, in his insistence on the physical sensations of his lovers, the bodily translations of emotion. In Venus, leaning over Adonis, he notes:
"When her lips and eyes
Were closed in sullen moisture, and quick sighs
Came vexed and panting through her nostrils small."
And, in another line, he writes:
"By the moist languor of thy breathing face."