Reading Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem

Through its readings of Charles Baudelaire's collection Le Spleen de Paris and other prose poems from the nineteenth century, this book considers the practice of reading prose poetry and how it might be different from reading poetry in verse. Among the numerous factors that helped shape the nascent modernity in Baudelaire's poetic prose are the poems' themes, forms, linguistic qualities, and modes. The contradictions identifiable at the level of prose poetry's discourse are similarly perceptible in other aspects of Baudelaire's poetic language, beyond the discursive: in the poems' formal considerations, which retain recognisable traces of verse despite their prose presentation; and, with respect to both poetic form and thematics, in the sights and sounds that contribute to their poeticity. With a focus on what makes prose texts poetic, this study sheds light on Baudelaire the practitioner of the prose poem, as he navigated and complicated the boundaries between verse, prose, and poetry. Rather than rejecting those categories, Baudelaire forges a poetic space in which the notions of poetry and prose are recast, juxtaposed in a delicate balance in a textual space they manage to share. This coexistence of poetry and prose--previously thought of as incompatible--is the underlying tension and framework that contributes importantly to the modernity of his prose poetry. In turn, this new mode of poetry calls for new modes of reading poetry and new ways of engaging with a text. Cover 1 Reading Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem 4 Copyright 5 Acknowledgments 6 Contents 8 List of Figures 10 Introduction: The Miracle of Prose Poetry 12 The Miracle of Poetic Prose 36 The Look of Modern Poetry 45 Situation of the Prose Poem: Seeing and Hearing 49 Between Verse and Prose 58 1: Seeing Things in Poetry 76 The Eyes Have It 84 Seeing Time, Telling Time 97 2: Speech Interrupting Poetic Prose 128 When the Eyes Don’t Have It 128 Saying and Doing 141 Repeating (One’s) Self 154 Final Words 174 3: The Dialect of Modernity 181 What Else is Heard 183 Stealing Signs 218 4: Inebriations and Irritations 230 Going Beyond 231 Distractions 262 Epilogue: The Prose Poem after Le Spleen de Paris 289 “Inspecter l’invisible et entendre l’inouï” 303 Coda: “où la prose décolle” 308 Bibliography 312 Index 326 Works by Charles Baudelaire 326 General Index 328 A study of Charles Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris (1859) that explores how the practice of reading prose poems might be different from reading poetry in verse. It illustrates how Baudelaire wrote texts that he considered poems and how this form shows aspects of his poetic modernity. A study of Charles Baudelaire's Le spleen de Paris (1859) that explores how the practice of reading prose poems might be different from reading poetry in verse, illustrating how Baudelaire wrote texts that he considered poems and how this form shows aspects of his poetic modernity