Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weigh you down and crush you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, or on the green grass in a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and find the drunkenness half or entirely gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the clock, of all that flies, of all that speaks, ask what hour it is; and wind, wave, star, bird, or clock will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Be Drunken, if you would not be the martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please.

When Baudelaire returned from Belgium after his stroke Manet and his wife were frequent visitors at the nursing home and Charles Baudelaire would play passages from Wagner for Baudelaire on the piano. Like Poe Baudelaire believed in the doctrine of original sin denounced democracy and the idea of progress and of man's natural goodness and Poe held a disdainful aristocratic attitude similar to Baudelaire's dandy. "


Pleasure
"Personally I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil.

His most famous work Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others.