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> You probably need to have at least a little of the same darkness in your soul to get something out of it

In France he's part of the normal curriculum so every student reads and studies some of his poems (sometimes the whole book) between the ages of 15-17. Maybe that explains some of our national character?

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The curriculum is larger than what can be taught in a couple of years. Literature professors get to pick the texts that will be studied in class. Therefore, chance plays a role in whether a given student will study Rimbaud or Baudelaire. In my case it was the former.

I used to try to convince the faculty at a stodgy Texas University to let me name courses (this was Texas A&M's Dept of CS); your course? "Baguettes and Baudelaire". My suggestion for the programming language course "Cunning linguists for Typical hands" was outright rejected, BTW. I argued that it had a great movie reference.

I studied both and so did my three kids (each in a different school). You can't really escape Molière, Hugo, Rimbaud and Baudelaire (and some others too).

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