This 19th-Century French Poet Was The Ancestor Of Today’s Goth Kids

Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) wore black, dyed his hair green, broke with his family, refused to get a regular job, did absinthe and opium, had too much illicit sex, and, of course, died young. Better, “his first collections of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), was prosecuted for offending public morals, challenging its audiences with its startling treatments of sex, Satanism, vampirism and decay. No wonder his words would one day be set to music by The Cure.” – The Conversation