Any Where Out of this Verse: Baudelaire's Prose Poetics and the Aesthetics of Transgression

Baudelaire's prose poem form emerges from a productive tension between his verse and critical prose writings. This prose constitutes the textual enactment of an "aesthetics of transgression" which, as articulated in Baudelaire's "Exposition universelle de 1855," locates beauty in the violation rather than application of aesthetic rules and norms. The article recasts Baudelaire's self-contradictory elements as a series of self-violations, performative instances of the "beau bizarre" he valorizes, a process demonstrated through an integrated reading of textual "interpenetrations" within and among "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe," "La Beauté," "Hymne à la Beauté," and "La Chambre Double." (AJ)