Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire is staking a claim for poetic license that sounds like freedom and functions like contraband. The “incomparable privilege” isn’t just that a poet can invent characters; it’s that he can slip identities on and off without having to ask permission from morality, class, or even a stable self. In mid-19th century Paris, where respectability was a social currency and surveillance could be literal (censors, courts) as well as cultural (the bourgeois gaze), this is an argument for mobility: the poet as shape-shifter moving through the city’s roles the way a flaneur moves through crowds.

The subtext is defensive and a little defiant. Baudelaire was famously prosecuted for Les Fleurs du mal, accused of corrupting public morals. So “being himself and others” doubles as a strategy: if a poem voices desire, cruelty, boredom, or blasphemy, it can be confession and mask at once. The poet can claim truth and disavowal in the same breath. That ambiguity is the point, not a bug. It’s how art tells on society while retaining plausible deniability.

There’s also a modern psychology embedded in the line. Baudelaire treats identity as plural, curated, performable - less a solid core than a repertoire. The poet becomes an early specialist in what we’d now call code-switching, except his arena is the inner life. His “privilege” is to turn that instability into form, to make a virtue out of the fractured self that modernity keeps producing.