It is always interesting when random touchstones from my life appear on Hacker News: books like the Aubrey-Maturin (master and commander) series, Ursula Le Guin’s works, Dante, John Le Carre’s George Smiley novels, Tolstoy... and now Charles Baudelaire, at the top of the page no less.
Baudelaire was a dark misanthrope and the poetry is very bleak. His life was not happy and he died at 46. You probably need to have at least a little of the same darkness in your soul to get something out of it.
It’s worth remembering too, how strange and controversial this work was when it first came out, using traditional verse forms but with a relentlessly modern subject, poetry from the gutter of the 19th-century city. Modernism in literature has had 150 years to settle but this is the raw beginnings.
Some good ones: The Albatross, Invitation to the Voyage, Evening Harmony, and the Epilogue (“Le coeur content, je suis monté sur la montagne”). And many others.