Baudelaire’s poetry is difficult to place within a single poetic movement because his work drew from the history of literature while radically pushing against poetic tradition. On one hand, he was a classical poet who adhered to formal prosodic conventions in pursuit of an ideal beauty, but on the other hand, he was a Romanticist who revolted against conventional morality. This is why Baudelaire is sometimes referred to as the last Romantic poet and the harbinger of Modernist poetry, making him a pivotal figure in French and world literature.

Baudelaire wrote in the mid-19th century, when Romanticism—with its emphasis on emotion, subjective experience, and nature—was still a powerful literary ideal. However, the poet’s early career witnessed the advent of the Parnassian poetry movement in France. This movement emphasized refinement, formal elegance, and objective description instead of the emotional outpourings of Romanticism. Parnassianism’s attention to technical perfection and formal restraint had a significant impact on Baudelaire, whose poems demonstrate precision, often using the sonnet and other classical forms.

Nonetheless, Baudelaire did not completely succumb to the refining impulse of the Parnassian movement. His work pushed against the purely descriptive in favor of poems of a more metaphysical nature.