Educated at the same lyceé as Degas, attached to yet estranged from his domineering mother, stepson of an army general whom he despised, dependent on exiguous handouts from his financial guardian, humiliated by his cruel Haitian mistress, addicted to hashish and ravaged by syphilis, the brilliant Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) was abrasive and self-destructive. The photographer Félix Nadar—who took his portrait, with bulging forehead and flowing hair—described him as “a nervous, testy, irritable, and irritating young poet, often utterly unpleasant in private.”

In his rambling series of vague aperçus—without any clear structure or argument—Roberto Calasso focuses on Baudelaire as an art critic, not as a poet, and discusses Ingres and Delacroix, Degas and Manet, as well as Rimbaud, Laforgue, Flaubert, and Proust. Calasso’s erudition and style have been highly praised, yet this book shows the same obvious weaknesses and tedious mannerisms that also marred his work on Kafka.

He uses verbatim repetition when introducing a quote; lapses into ponderous vacuity: “a writer is he who inevitably reveals things . . . through the written word” and Sainte-Beuve has “a tightrope walker’s ability to protect his own respectability;” indulges in far-fetched analogies: “For Baudelaire, the disappearance of the old place du Carrousel . . . is like the disappearance of Troy for Andromache;” makes incorrect assertions (from Gottfried Benn): “ ‘Snow’ . . . offers little in the way of either linguistic or emotional ideas,” though the chapter called “Snow” is the high point of The Magic Mountain;