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Baudelaire, in his last years, planned a new (“augmented”) edition of The Flowers of Evil and, as “pendant” to that work, a volume of “little poems in prose.” He did not live to see fulfilled either of these projects. The third edition of The Flowers of Evil came out the year after his death, as volume one of Complete Works; a year later (1869) volume four of this posthumous omnibus included the prose poems. For neither collection had Baudelaire left very precise instructions (in spite of various lists) and the contents for both were arranged by the editors.

In 1863 he had written the publisher Hetzel (most famous now for the big red hardbacks of Jules Verne) that Paris Spleen would contain a hundred poems — of which he was still, he said, thirty short. In his remains were found only the fifty offered here.

He had published prose poems as early as 1855 (two years before the first — condemned — edition of The Flowers of Evil), so the book was not a sudden new idea. In a rare case he had rewritten a prose poem in verse; more often (but not really often) redone a verse poem into prose. Some poets write drafts in prose, then work them into verse. This was not Baudelaire’s practice.

POETRY, PROSE, VERSE

‘Prose’ in the phrase ‘prose and poetry’ has not the same meaning as ‘prose’ when opposed to ‘verse.’ We have in English, as Eliot noted decades ago, three words: prose, poetry, and verse — where we need four. The culprit is ‘prose.’ The same problem exists in French.

To distinguish prose from verse is easy: The basic element of prose is the sentence; that of verse, the line.

Baudelaire had no reason to question that he was writing poetry, for which I am not about to hazard a definition. After all, The Flowers of Evil was known to be a book of poems (its morality was argued, never its genre), and Paris Spleen he intended not to break with, but to continue, that work. The change from earlier to later was not poetry-to-prose but specifically verse-to-prose.

THE TITLE

The title adopted for the posthumous printing, Little Poems in Prose, which makes this perfectly clear, is a phrase the author had used for the collection he was working towards, but used descriptively, not as a title. Titles he had aplenty, such as Nocturnal Poems, Evening Twilight, The Solitary Walker, even Lycanthropic Poems — plus the one he came closest to having settled on, Paris Spleen.

Impossible not to notice how this last calls up the largest section of The Flowers of Evil, “Spleen and Ideal,” how in fact it seems to emphasize the melancholic spleen by dismissing the blissful ideal. And if this is taken as tendency, rather than as a strict rule, it is to the point. “Here again,” he also wrote, “is The Flowers of Evil, but much freer, more detailed, and with more raillery.”

Raillery (his word is raillerie, which the English word comes from) is not lacking in the verse poems, but in the prose poems is more obvious and more pungent. Here the snarl of satire and its nasty laughter are closer to the surface. Breton dug into these pages for his famous anthology of “black humor.”

WHY?

If he was continuing the poetry of The Flowers of Evil, why did he move gradually from verse to prose?

On one level this is a silly question, suggesting the obvious answer, “Because he wanted to.” A not entirely silly answer, since artists often need a change somewhere along. Not a complete change, which is rare (and sometimes catastrophic), but some difference in the doing. In Baudelaire’s case, having worked through two versions of The Flowers of Evil (the first having been condemned), the next book of poems would not likely try for absolutely the same thing.

But we might speculate a little.

Literary language always veers off to some extent from everyday, and other, modes of speech. In French literature (probably in most literatures), the veer is greater than in English. Until recently a French novel would be expected to use a verb tense never heard in conversation, and the meter (along with the pronunciation) of verse was highly formalized. Neither of these conventions has altogether disappeared.

Rhyme is much more important to French verse than to English (our most famous plays and our greatest epic being in blank verse — something practically unknown in French letters). French rhymes are technically classed as poor, sufficient, or rich, depending on how many elements are involved. A rime riche has the same consonants as well as the identical vowel (which, in English, would destroy the rhyme: for us, ‘hole’ does not rhyme with ‘whole’ or ‘hale’ with ‘inhale’).

And it so happens that in the eighteen-forties (Baudelaire then in his twenties and already working on poems for his coming book) there was intense engagement in extending or tightening the already rather strict rules of prosody, including those of rhyme. Only rich rhymes, for instance, were really respected. This growing movement, not yet named, would come to be called “Parnassus.”

The poems in The Flowers of Evil are in various classical meters and they rhyme in the classical manner. They more or less keep up with the new emphasis on rich rhyme. But his rhymes, in the fury of the fad, could be (and sometimes were) read as banal. It was noted, for instance, that he tended to repeat rhymes: ténèbre / funèbre is a rich rhyme but in Les Fleurs du mal it appears in at least ten poems. And lustre / illustre is in several poems, and — though rich — was a rhyme considered “commonplace.”

His book has survived such disparagement, but at the time, Baudelaire can hardly have appreciated what he must have taken as petty criticism. It could be (I have no real evidence) that the notion of simply walking away from such tiresome over-regulation, moving into a medium still free of managers, was appealing.

But what was it he was walking into?

THE POEM IN PROSE

“Which of us,” he asks a friend and fellow poet in the dedicatory epistle you will find by turning a few pages, “has not . . . dreamt the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme . . . ?” (The letter, by the way, was written to go with a group of twenty of these prose poems in a review of 1862, edited by Houssaye, later attached to the posthumous edition.)

By “rhythm” he means, of course, meter, a paradigm of rhythm. He does want the work to be “musical,” its prose to be “poetic.” Since there are some who suppose a prose poem less “genuine” (whatever that means) or “easier to write” than a poem in verse, I can only admit that to me every attempt at beauty seems infinitely difficult and all great art is “miracle.”

To get a feel for the difference, and the similarity, between the verse of The Flowers of Evil and the prose of Paris Spleen, look (preferably in the original) at “Invitation to the Voyage” in the two books. I make no suggestion that one is better than the other.

Several models for Baudelaire’s prose poetry might easily be brought up, such as “The Centaur” of Maurice de Guérin or something from Alphonse Rabbe’s Album of a Pessimist. Or certain pieces by Poe that Baudelaire himself had translated: “Shadow — A Parable” or “Silence — A Fable.” And even Eureka, which Poe himself had called a “prose poem.” But, as you will notice from the same letter to Houssaye, Baudelaire specifies his model.

ALOYSIUS BERTRAND

Accounts of Aloysius Bertrand’s life (born 1807 as Louis Bertrand) are weighed down with sickness, poverty, lost jobs, unaccepted work. A play was hissed (in Dijon, not Paris), a later play rejected under three different changes of title. The year after Bertrand’s death in 1841, his book of prose poems, Gaspard de la Nuit, written over a period of years, was published, but hardly noticed, the introduction by Sainte-Beuve no doubt responsible for what meager attention it got. The most recent edition I have seen of Gaspard calls Bertrand the “incontestable inventor of the French prose poem.”

The book has, for our concern, an important sub-title, Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot, a slightly altered crib from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s title for a collection of stories, Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner. Hoffmann, composer as well as writer and painter, was using the term fantasy as musicians do: sonata, fugue, waltz . . . all such labels indicate some predetermined structure (as does meter, as does rhyme . . .), whereas a fantasy has no set pattern, but is determined by its own internal development.

Both Hoffmann and Bertrand give a bow to the seventeenth-century artist Jacques Callot, probably to warn readers of grotesqueries they will encounter. Bertrand adds (for balance, we may suppose) the name Rembrandt.

Since much Baudelaire criticism seems to sell Bertrand short, let me say at once that I think Gaspard de la Nuit a wonderful book. It is, in Baudelaire’s phrase, “singularly different” from his own poems. But that is no reason to deny that it helped Baudelaire settle on what his own poems in prose might be.

The third book of Gaspard (“The Night and Its Marvels”) is a series of eleven poems on death in which death is presented with as much raillery as anything in Paris Spleen. Scarbo, the disgusting dwarf psychopomp, presumably gets his name from escarbot, slang for a dung-beetle.

Scarbo

“Dying, whether absolved or damned,” murmured Scarbo in my ear this night, “your winding sheet will be a spider’s web, and I will bury in it, along with you, the spider.”

“Oh,” I made reply, eyes red with weeping, “give me at least, for shroud, an aspen leaf, to cradle me in the lake’s breath.”

“No!” cried the dwarf in mockery [le nain railleur], “but you can be fodder for snails who, evenings, hunt flies blinded by the setting sun.”

“Would you prefer then,” I continued, still in tears, “would you prefer me to be sucked up by a tarantula’s elephantine trunk?”

“Well all right,” he said then, “console yourself: with gold-speckled snakeskin I will wrap you like a mummy,

“And from where I deposit you, propped upright against a wall in the dark crypt of Saint Benign, you will be able to hear at leisure the wailing of babies in Limbo.”

AND AFTER?

For half a century, French prose poems clearly echo those of Baudelaire. (With exceptions, such as the lovely chinoiserie of Judith Gautier’s Book of Jade, in versets, published the year of Baudelaire’s death. Or, of course, the unique prose epic Songs of Maldoror.)

And not just the French: Oscar Wilde and Turgenev are in the vein (Yeats considered the style of Wilde’s prose poems affected).

Mallarmé, after reading the twenty prose poems Baudelaire published in 1862, answered two years later with a couple of his own — dedicated “to Charles Baudelaire” (who, note, was still alive). By his 1897 collection Divagations, these had grown into a group of thirteen prose poems, labeled “Anecdotes or Poems.”

This is one of those dedicated to Baudelaire, but in its final version:

Autumn Complaint

Since Maria left me for another star — which? Orion? Altair? you, green Venus? — I’ve always cherished solitude. Such long days I have passed, alone with my cat. By alone I mean without a material other, my cat being mystical companion, a spirit. So I may say that I have passed long days alone with my cat and, alone, with one of the last authors of the Latin decadence; for since my lucent being is no more, I have loved strangely and peculiarly all that is suggested in the word fall. My favorite time of year is the last languid days of summer, the cusp of autumn — and of the day, my hour of stroll while the sun hesitates before disappearing, its rays brazen on gray walls and on windows coppery. In literature likewise, my spirit’s voluptuous insistence remains in the poetic death-throes of Rome’s last moments — but stopping short of any whiff of Barbarian rejuvenescence, and no jabbered childish Latin of earlier Christian prose.

I was reading one of those dear poems (whose gross makeup charms me more than youth’s rosy cheeks), running my hand through a fur purely animal, when below my window an organ-grinder sang out with languor and melancholy. He played in the lane lined with poplars, whose leaves now seem sad to me even in spring, since Maria, decked with candles, passed her last time that way. Instrument, truly, of the sad: the piano sparkles, the violin illuminates strings torn, but that hurdy-gurdy, in memorial twilight, dragged me into desperate dreams. Murmuring now a joyously vulgar air, making merry suburban hearts, a tune out of date and banal: how could its recurrences reach my soul to make me weep, like some romantic ballad? I savored it slowly and threw no coin from the window, for fear I might do something mad, or might find that the instrument was not singing alone.

And I will only mention here the best known of Paris Spleen’s offspring, the Illuminations of Rimbaud and A Season in Hell. Vastly influential they have been; among the Modernists, their influence in some ways eclipsing that of Baudelaire’s.

In France the prose poem, after Reverdy and Max Jacob, becomes omnipresent. And American poets, in recent years, seem to have gotten the idea.