Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature. In this essay, Kelly examines the ways in which Baudelaire's poetry fits into the literary categories of romanticism and symbolism, while actually being a part of neither movement.

Depending on which critics you read, the poetry of nineteenth-century French writer Charles Baudelaire might be fitted into several different places in literary history. Some place him as a late member of the romantic movement; others as a precursor, by several decades, of the French symbolists. Still others will resist putting him into any category, and will explain the illogic of doing so by saying that his work was just too unique to force into a grouping with any others. All of these assertions have been made by intelligent, thoughtful critics, and each is right in its own way (and therefore, of course, wrong in its own way as well...