SOURCE: "To Arsène Houssaye," in Paris Spleen, 1869, translated by Louise Varèse, New Directions, 1947, pp. ix-x.

Below, Baudelaire describes his prose poems to Arsène Houssaye, editor of La Presse, who published twenty of his pieces in late 1862.

My dear friend, I send you a little work of which no one can say, without doing it an injustice, that it has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. I beg you to consider how admirably convenient this combination is for all of us, for you, for me, and for the reader. We can cut wherever we please, I my dreaming, you your manuscript, the reader his reading; for I do not keep the reader's restive mind hanging in suspense on the threads of an interminable and superfluous plot. Take away one vertebra and the two...