Baudelaire’s « Le Thyrse » and « Les Vocations » are re-examined in the light of Liszt’s work The Bohemians and Their Music in Hungary. By evoking the Bohemians or the symbol of the thyrsus, the poet encapsulates the main characteristics of gypsy music that Listz advances : the passionate intoxication that it expresses, its unruly fantasy, its reaching for the ideal, its vibrant mix of pleasure and pain. The thyrsus becomes the symbol of the hungarian legacy which feeds Liszt’s music (most notably Hungarian Rhapsodies) but also the symbol of the spiritual brotherhood of spirit between the musician and the poet : both defend an aesthetic in which freedom is joined to conscious control. In Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire in his turn appears as the rhapsod of modernity : he appropriates motifs from the modern world, things seen in his urban environment or things read (in Liszt for example) and creates in Le Spleen de Paris an epic of modern civilisation placed under the sign of imagination, paradox, and the conscious intention to create a work of art