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Books Like Petits poèmes en prose
Best books to read after Petits poèmes en prose by Baudelaire
Baudelaire's founding collection of modern prose poetry (posthumous 1869) — urban, ironic poems of the modern city including 'L'Étranger,' 'Enivrez-vous,' and 'Les Foules.' If this hybrid, compressed genre fascinated you, these books explore similar territory.
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Buy on AmazonLes Fleurs du mal
by Charles Baudelaire
The verse companion — the same themes in the formal register of the sonnet, which provides the essential context for what the prose poem experiments are doing differently.
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Buy on AmazonIlluminations
by Arthur Rimbaud
The most radical extension of the prose poem tradition that Baudelaire establishes — Rimbaud takes the form to its visionary extreme in poems that abandon Baudelaire's ironic control for pure intensity.
- 3
Buy on AmazonUne Saison en enfer
by Arthur Rimbaud
Rimbaud's autobiographical prose poem sequence — the most direct development of the urban, spiritual, and ironic register of Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose.
- 4
Buy on AmazonGaspard de la Nuit
by Aloysius Bertrand
The work Baudelaire explicitly cites as his model — Bertrand's medieval fantasy prose poems, which Baudelaire transforms by replacing the medieval subject matter with the modern city.
- 5
Buy on AmazonParis Peasant
by Louis Aragon
Aragon's Surrealist prose poem of Paris — the twentieth-century continuation of the Petits poèmes en prose tradition, in which the city is explored through the intensified perception of the Surrealist flâneur.
- 6Buy on Amazon
Le Paysan de Paris
by Louis Aragon
The Surrealist version — Aragon's 1926 prose poem of the Paris arcades inherits the Baudelairean tradition of the modern city as a source of both shock and beauty, developing it through the Surrealist method of juxtaposition.
- 7Buy on Amazon
Nadja
by André Breton
Breton's Surrealist prose poem novel — the most direct twentieth-century heir to the tradition of the flâneur wandering through Paris, finding beauty and mystery in the modern city's ordinary surfaces.
- 8
Buy on AmazonLeaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman
Whitman's great American prose poem sequence — the American contemporary parallel to Baudelaire's development of a poetry of the modern city and the crowd, from a very different national and temperamental standpoint.
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