ABSTRACT
Charles Baudelaire's initial contact with Ralph Waldo Emerson came sometime between the publication of the first series of Essays in 1841 and Montegut's translation mentioned by Baudelaire in the notes for Le Hibou philosophe. To arrive at a more complete and complex picture of Baudelaire's relation to Emerson we need to restore the explicit references and quotations scattered throughout the Journaux intimes to their proper context in The Conduct of Life, then to restore The Conduct of Life to its proper context. Genius of heroic calibre is defined by Emerson in Heroism as 'obedience to the secret impulse of an individual's character'. Heroism is 'the extreme of individual nature'. Representative Men provided further ideas about the 'Uses of Great Men', a brilliant expose of the doctrine of universal analogy, a propos of Swedenborg, and a definition of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's modern genius which fits exactly Baudelaire's own prescriptions about modernity.
