Baudelaire felt that beauty revealed a spiritual world that corresponded to the tangible world and it was the responsibility of the artist to show us these connections. He is noted for his colored hearing and his aesthetic theory. These are all French poets, but they wrote at the same time as Hopkins and their poetry, I think, reflects the anxiety of the time and the crumbling of society as it had been previously structured. All of these poets, including Hopkins, reacted strongly to the rising bourgeois class and the industrialization of England and then Europe. Thus the Victorian period is a time of ambiguity and transition.
Logic is seen as absolute and triumphant.
The Industrial Revolution leads to a loss of what had generally been accepted as traditional Christian faith. For some, the Bible or the Church becomes a refuge from a world that is cold and offers no meaning. Belief is a way to center one s life. This was a very self-conscious period. Many were questioning their relationship with the natural world and their place in it.