This paper tries to show the importance of Baudelaire’s poetry, taking as a start point the questionof communication. Through two figures, borrowed from the arsenal of classical rhetoric, hyperboleand apostrophe, Baudelaire builds the very poetics of modernity. The modern poem is at the sametime open to its readers (receptors) – by the means of apostrophe, and closed in the limits of itsmaking of language – by the means of hyperbole. The chosen examples for illustrating the dialecticsbetween apostrophe and hyperbole are some verse poems (Le Rêve d’un curieux, Le Masque,Obsession, Héautontimorouménos), and a prose poem (L’Invitation au voyage).