Poetry in a Prosaic World

• the poème en prose has the notion of differentiation

built into its generic label. Baudelaire, who named the modern genre of prose
poetry, was especially concerned with presenting his prose poems as different
from whatever came before them. This concern is apparent in his dedication to
Arsène Houssaye
• Baudelaire’s concern with the will is not a unique feature of his prose
poems.6 Whether, as in “Au Lecteur” (“To the Reader”), “the rich metal of our
will / Is completely dissolved” by an alchemist-Satan figure, or, as in
“Paysage” (“Landscape”), where the poet speaks of his ability “to conjure up
Spring with the force of [his] will,” Baudelaire aligns artistic creation on the
side of the will and views a loss of this power as a fall from an ideal into a
splenetic everyday existence.
• The sonnet, sir, is one of the most difficult works of poetry. This little
poem [petit poëme] has generally been abandoned. No one in France
could rival Petrarch, whose language, infinitely more supple than ours, allows
for plays of thought repelled by our positivism—excuse the term.