Through its readings of Charles Baudelaire's collection Le Spleen de Paris and other prose poems from the nineteenth century, this book considers the practice of reading prose poetry and how it might be different from reading poetry in verse. Among the numerous factors that helped shape the nascent modernity in Baudelaire's poetic prose are the poems' themes, forms, linguistic qualities, and modes. The contradictions identifiable at the level of prose poetry's discourse are similarly perceptible in other aspects of Baudelaire's poetic language, beyond the discursive: in the poems' formal considerations, which retain recognisable traces of verse despite their prose presentation; and, with respect to both poetic form and thematics, in the sights and sounds that contribute to their poeticity. With a focus on what makes prose texts poetic, this study sheds light on Baudelaire the practitioner of the prose poem, as he navigated and complicated the boundaries between verse, prose, and poetry. Rather than rejecting those categories, Baudelaire forges a poetic space in which the notions of poetry and prose are recast, juxtaposed in a delicate balance in a textual space they manage to share. This coexistence of poetry and prose--previously thought of as incompatible--is the underlying tension and framework that contributes importantly to the modernity of his prose poetry. In turn, this new mode of poetry calls for new modes of reading poetry and new ways of engaging with a text.

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.

Reviews
This new study explores how Charles Baudelaire's prose poetry extends the expressive potential of poetry in the nineteenth century...scholarly richness and intellectual bravery of this study. Readers will want to revisit this book often. * Maria C. Scott, University of Exeter, French Studies *
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". * Scott Carpenter, Nineteenth-Century French Studies *



Book Information
ISBN 9780192849908
Author Seth Whidden
Format Hardback
Page Count 332
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 666g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 162mm * 22mm