If I'm being honest, I'd have to say that the books which had the earliest effect on me were the first ones I read in grade school:
Les Fleurs du Mal, by Baudelaire, the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe and Martin Gardner's three annotated editions of Lewis Carroll. For some odd reason, I read Poe's satirical stories before the classics and
The Hunting of the Snark before
Alice in Wonderland.
The first poems I ever wrote were acrostics (after Lewis Carrol's) and imitations of Baudelaire with a touch of Prufrock. I have vivid memories of writing a sonnet about a courtesan whose flesh turned out to be webwork concealing a living spider for a heart. It was pure Charles B. and probably still exists in my fifth grade notebook. I remember my home teacher arching one eyebrow and asking if I'd ever heard of Sade.
The thing that I seemed to take away from Baudelaire was a nihilistic and horror-ready outlook that was poetic, abrasive and
polemical.
Also: People seem not to mention this often, but Baudelaire had a nihilistic view of mankind that was as misanthropic as Cioran's or Ligotti's.
Here's my free translation of an example of from
Les Fleurs:
Quote:
On the black screen of evening, God sketches
A ceaseless nightmare: multiplicities of form.
I dread sleep's enormous hole, which brims
With shapeless horrors bound to nothingness.
I see the Infinite leer through every window
As vertigo haunts and stalks my plummeting spirit,
Which is itself too envious of the senseless. Ah, never,
Never to be free of the permutations of numbers and beings!
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