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Horrifying the Homais: The Challenge of the Prose Poem
- L'Esprit Créateur
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 39, Number 1, Spring 1999
- pp. 37-47
- 10.1353/esp.2010.0354
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Horrifying the Homais: The Challenge of the Prose Poem Rosemary Lloyd Il est vrai que plus que la poésie, peut-être, le poème en prose terrifie les Homais qui composent la majeure partie du public. —Joris-Karl Huysmans Sans forme, qui nous consolera? —Jean-Charles Vegliante IN A PERPLEXED BUT CHARMING LETTER, Mallarmé's friend, the artist Berthe Morisot, confessed herself disconcerted by the prose poem that Mallarmé had asked her to illustrate, a piece bearing the title "Le Nénuphar blanc": "Vous seriez bien aimable de venir dîner jeudi," she wrote. "Renoir et moi sommes très ahuris; nous avons besoin d'explications pour les illustrations."' In this prose poem, Mallarmé's narrator chooses to forego the possibility of meeting a woman who might become his lover, preferring instead the "vierge absence en cette solitude," which he finds symbolized in that "idéale fleur," the white water lily. Like the narrator, I would like not so much to respond here to the invitation to meditate in general terms on the genre of the prose poem, as to try to pluck from the works of Baudelaire and Mallarmé some equivalent of that ideal flower, on whose white surface something might be written. Let's accept that to some extent Morisot's reaction was the right one, that faced with a work of art, and perhaps especially when it is a work of art that is part of what Barbara Johnson has called Baudelaire's "second revolution,"2 we should indeed feel that shudder of surprise and shock that surges over us at the recognition of a questioning of what we had hitherto taken for granted. It is in that light, that of the reader shaken by the demands of a work of art, that I would like to seize this opportunity if not to seek out explanations of the sort that could have calmed Morisot, at least to penetrate somewhat more deeply into the ahurissement caused by the genre of the prose poem. J'avais beaucoup ramé, d'un grand geste assoupi, les yeux au-dedans fixés sur l'entier oubli d'aller.3 The nineteenth century, as Graham Robb has so clearly demonstrated in his study of Baudelaire and the poetry of his times," had for its part also greatly Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 37 L'Esprit Créateur rowed, or rhymed, equalizing the two oars of the lines of verse in a gesture that had for many become so mechanical that it served merely the better to rock the reveries of a poet lost in his or her thoughts, forgetful of the currents that carried the poem-canoe along. The reassuring presence of the rhyme, as well as the imposition of a form which, even if it were not totally divorced from the substance, at least forced that substance to adapt itself to a pre-established pattern, lends the poetry of this period, despite or perhaps because of the great variety of prosodie forms, a movement or rather a sense of progression that towards the middle of the century began to produce in certain minds a productive malaise, a salutory sea-sickness. Thus, in a letter to Jean Morel, the poet of "Le Cygne" and of the "Sept Vieillards" claims: "Je crains bien d'avoir simplement réussi à dépasser les limites assignés à la Poésie,"5 and later, writing to Sainte-Beuve, who for his part had brought about the posthumous publication of Aloysius Bertrand's collection of prose poems Gaspard de la nuit, Baudelaire speaks of his prose poems in the following terms: Je me mets toujours sur les bras des besognes difficiles. Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui exigent une bonne humeur constante (bonne humeur nécessaire même pour traiter des sujets tristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin de spectacles, de foules, de musique, de réverbères même, voilà ce que j'ai voulu faire! Je n'en suis qu'à soixante, et je ne peux plus aller. J'ai besoin de ce fameux bain de multitude dont l'incorrection vous avait justement choqué. (BCorr II, 493) Like the narrator of Mallarmé's "Nénuphar blanc" Baudelaire claims...