 Before the 19th century, a few authors had started writing poetry and prose (the most important being Gotthard Friedrich Stender).But Latvian literature can be said to have really started only in the nineteenth century, with the book Songs by Juris Alunans, where he wanted to show that deep and noble feelings can also be expressed in Latvian, which the Baltic-German Barons regarded as a peasant tongue.This volume of poetry was published in 1856, the same year as Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal", the starting point of European modernism in poetry.