Petits poèmes en prose Reading Order

What is a prose poem and how does Baudelaire develop the form?

The prose poem is a literary hybrid: a piece of writing that has the compression, intensity, and attention to sound and image of poetry but is written in prose sentences rather than in verse. Baudelaire did not invent the form — it had precedents in Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and especially Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit (1842), which Baudelaire explicitly acknowledges as his model in the preface to Petits poèmes en prose — but he is the writer who established the prose poem as a major literary form. What Baudelaire does with the form that Bertrand could not is to combine the prose poem's freedom from metrical constraint with a distinctly modern urban subject matter and a distinctly modern ironic tone. Bertrand's prose poems are medieval fantasies; Baudelaire's are poems of Paris, of the crowd, of the contemporary experience of alienation and beauty. The form turns out to be perfectly suited to this subject matter: the prose poem's lack of the formal organization of verse mirrors the modern city's lack of the organic unity of nature, and the ironic commentary that prose allows (impossible in the strict sonnet form) is the appropriate response to the duplicity and self-consciousness of the modern experience.