Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) is the inventor of modern poetry: so said T.S. Eliot, and he was right. Though Baudelaire did experiment with prose poems, his metrical forms were by and large very traditional (he favored classical alexandrines); the content, however, and his very concept of the nature of poetry, were very new and had an enormous impact on subsequent poets the world over. Meanwhile, he was also a (if not the) leading art critic of his day, in which line of work he was likewise very influential. In addition to which accomplishments he is, according to me, a fons et origo, or saint, or martyr, of the post-modern. All of this, and he didn't even live a full fifty years on this planet!