Paris Spleen: little poems in prose

Translator’s Introduction

vii translator’s introduction Baudelaire, in his last years, planned a new (“augmented”) edition of The Flowers of Evil and, as “pendant” to that work, a volume of “little poems in prose.” He did not live to see fulfilled either of these projects. The third edition of The Flowers of Evil came out the year after his death, as volume one of Complete Works; a year later (1869) volume four of this posthumous omnibus included the prose poems. For neither collection had Baudelaire left very precise instructions (in spite of various lists) and the contents for both were arranged by the editors. In 1863 he had written the publisher Hetzel (most famous now for the big red hardbacks of Jules Verne) that Paris Spleen would contain a hundred poems—of which he was still, he said, thirty short. In his remains were found only the fifty offered here. He had published prose poems as early as 1855 (two years before the first—condemned—edition of The Flowers of Evil), so the book was not a sudden new idea. In a rare case he had rewritten a prose poem in verse; more often (but not really often) redone a verse poem into prose. Some poets write drafts in prose, then work them into verse. This was not Baudelaire’s practice. poetry, prose, verse ‘Prose’ in the phrase ‘prose and poetry’ has not the same meaning as ‘prose’ when opposed to ‘verse.’ We have in English, as Eliot noted decades ago, three words: prose, poetry, and verse—where we need four. The culprit is ‘prose.’ The same problem exists in French. To distinguish prose from verse is easy: The basic element of prose is the sentence; that of verse, the line. Baudelaire had no reason to question that he was writing poetry, viii for which I am not about to hazard a definition. After all, The Flowers of Evil was known to be a book of poems (its morality was argued, never its genre), and Paris Spleen he intended not to break with, but to continue, that work. The change from earlier to later was not poetryto -prose but specifically verse-to-prose. the title The title adopted for the posthumous printing, Little Poems in Prose, which makes this perfectly clear, is a phrase the author had used for the collection he was working towards, but used descriptively, not as a title. Titles he had aplenty, such as Nocturnal Poems, Evening Twilight, The Solitary Walker, even Lycanthropic Poems—plus the one he came closest to having settled on, Paris Spleen. Impossible not to notice how this last calls up the largest section of The Flowers of Evil, “Spleen and Ideal,” how in fact it seems to emphasize the melancholic spleen by dismissing the blissful ideal. And if this is taken as tendency, rather than as a strict rule, it is to the point. “Here again,” he also wrote, “is The Flowers of Evil, but much freer, more detailed, and with more raillery.” Raillery (his word is raillerie, which the English word comes from) is not lacking in the verse poems, but in the prose poems is more obvious and more pungent. Here the snarl of satire and its nasty laughter are closer to the surface. Breton dug into these pages for his famous anthology of “black humor.” why? If he was continuing the poetry of The Flowers of Evil, why did he move gradually from verse to prose? On one level this is a silly question, suggesting the obvious answer, “Because he wanted to.” A not entirely silly answer, since artists often need a change somewhere along. Not a complete change, which is rare (and sometimes catastrophic), but some difference in the doing. In Baudelaire’s case, having worked through two versions of The ix Flowers of Evil (the first having been condemned), the next book of poems would not likely try for absolutely the same thing. But we might speculate a little. Literary language always veers off to some extent from everyday , and other, modes of speech. In French literature (probably in most literatures), the veer is greater than in English. Until recently a French novel would be expected to use a verb tense never heard in conversation, and the meter (along with the pronunciation) of verse was highly formalized. Neither of these conventions has altogether disappeared. Rhyme is much more important to French verse than to English (our...