A Dangerous Hybridity: The Prose Poem at the fin de siècle

Abstract

Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose were central to legitimizing the prose poem as a poetic form; Baudelaire himself pointed to Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit as an inspiration for his own texts. After his death, Baudelaire and the prose poem became associated with Decadence, implying an embrace of a twilight culture. Yet Baudelaire’s prose poems were absolutely modern as they grew out of an urban experience and had a close, if subversive relationship with the “faits divers” and feuilletons of contemporary newspaper culture. This essay will explore the paradoxes of this hybrid form for the fin de siècle: of a genre associated with decadence that is at the forefront of innovation and radical speech; of a genre in France caught up in the rivalry between Decadence and Symbolism, with both in dialogue with anarchism; of a genre that suffers in England from the clash of legal and poetic discourse in the Wilde trial; and finally of a body of works that despite such their origins in the mists of the fin de siècle influenced major Modernist texts and set the stage for a Modernist aesthetic and ethos for the next century.