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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.
List of contents
- Introduction: The Miracle of Prose Poetry
- 1: Seeing Things in Poetry
- 2: Speech, Interrupting Poetic Prose
- 3: The Dialect of Modernity
- 4: Inebriations and Irritations
- Epilogue: The Prose Poem after Le Spleen de Paris
- Bibliography
About the author
Seth Whidden is a Professor of French at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in French at The Queen's College, Oxford. His research is focused on French literature of the nineteenth century, in particular on poetry. His publications include the monographs Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud and Authority in Crisis in French Literature, 1850-1880, the biography Arthur Rimbaud, and translations and critical editions. He is the editor of Nineteenth-Century French Studies.
Summary
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.
Additional text
It has become old hat to speak of Baudelaire and modernity in the same breath, especially in the context of the prose poems published in 1869 under the title Spleen de Paris. For many readers this modernity is entangled with notions of historicity that inform Baudelaire's allegorical vision—especially in its unresolvable ironies. In the ambitious volume before us, however, Seth Whidden proposes a substantially different approach, undertaking a formal study that owes more to the likes of Roman Jakobson than to, say, Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, or Ross Chambers. In a far-reaching examination of the collision of prose and verse in the Spleen de Paris, Whidden seeks to reveal "how prose poetry, by capturing and expressing different aspects of what is seen and heard, exposes certain elements of Baudelaire's poetic modernity".
