SOURCE: "Baudelaire and the Poetry of Prose," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. XII, Nos. 1 & 2, Fall-Winter, 1983-84, pp. 124-27.

Hiddleston is the author of Baudelaire and "Le spleen de Paris" (1987). In the following essay, he contends that Baudelaire's prose poems are poetical though they lack qualities traditionally associated with poetry, such as compact form and elevated language, sentiments, and subjects.

It is clear from the references to the Petits Poèmes en prose in his correspondence that Baudelaire intended them to complement Les Fleurs du mal and to provide a kind of companion volume. In 1862 he talks of the two works as "se faisant pendant réciproquement," and as late as 1866 he writes of the prose poems as being "encore Les Fleurs du mal, mais avec beaucoup plus de liberté, et de détail, et de raillerie" [Baudelaire, Correspondance, Pléiade edition, 1973]. In order to give expression to "toute l'amertume...