ABSTRACT
Baudelaire said that, in departing from Nature, inaugurated the poetry of 'modernity' and 'the capitals'. Nietzsche becomes an anxiously joyful affirmation miscarried in Baudelaire, and was only half accomplished. The deliberate eulogy of the artificial, the unnatural, the declaration of war upon that Nature which romanticism had regarded as kindly, but with which it had finally nauseated the more fastidious, and then an inverted romanticism, an anti-Rousseau romanticism, a Black Mass of romanticism that is what is incontestably new in Baudelaire, incontestably modern. People can conceive a criticism of romanticism which would be based on the negation of this postulate, they can imagine that some people they might be realists or cynics reject morality in the name of Nature, while others and these would be Puritans deny Nature in the name of morality. The misery of Satanism is that it achieves, in exchange for the lost Paradise, only the 'artificial Paradises'.
