The prose poem: a short history, a brief reflection and a dose of the real thing

Abstract

The prose poem arrived as a new self-proclaimed literary form in France, through Charles Baudelaire with his 1861 collection, Petits poèmes en prose. In a preface to one of these small poems he acknowledged Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit (1842) as his model. The next generation of French poets, including Mallarmé, Rimbaud and Lautréamont, took up this new form in a spirit of revolt and freedom from the constraining traditions of French verse. Richard Terdiman has written that ‘at just the historical moment when the term “prosaic” was mutating into a pejorative, the prose poem sought to reevaluate the expressive possibilities, and the social functionality, of prose itself’ (Terdiman 261).