French rhymes are technically classed as poor, sufficient, or rich, depending on how many elements are involved. A rime riche has the same consonants as well as the identical vowel (which, in English, would destroy the rhyme: for us, ‘hole’ does not rhyme with ‘whole’ or ‘hale’ with ‘inhale’).

And it so happens that in the eighteen-forties (Baudelaire then in his twenties and already working on poems for his coming book) there was intense engagement in extending or tightening the already rather strict rules of prosody, including those of rhyme. Only rich rhymes, for instance, were really respected. This growing movement, not yet named, would come to be called “Parnassus.”

The poems in The Flowers of Evil are in various classical meters and they rhyme in the classical manner. They more or less keep up with the new emphasis on rich rhyme. But his rhymes, in the fury of the fad, could be (and sometimes were) read as banal. It was noted, for instance, that he tended to repeat rhymes: ténèbre / funèbre is a rich rhyme but in Les Fleurs du mal it appears in at least ten poems. And lustre / illustre is in several poems, and — though rich — was a rhyme considered “commonplace.”

His book has survived such disparagement, but at the time, Baudelaire can hardly have appreciated what he must have taken as petty criticism. It could be (I have no real evidence) that the notion of simply walking away from such tiresome over-regulation, moving into a medium still free of managers, was appealing.

But what was it he was walking into?

THE POEM IN PROSE

“Which of us,” he asks a friend and fellow poet in the dedicatory epistle you will find by turning a few pages, “has not . . . dreamt the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme . . . ?” (The letter, by the way, was written to go with a group of twenty of these prose poems in a review of 1862, edited by Houssaye, later attached to the posthumous edition.)

By “rhythm” he means, of course, meter, a paradigm of rhythm. He does want the work to be “musical,” its prose to be “poetic.” Since there are some who suppose a prose poem less “genuine” (whatever that means) or “easier to write” than a poem in verse, I can only admit that to me every attempt at beauty seems infinitely difficult and all great art is “miracle.”

To get a feel for the difference, and the similarity, between the verse of The Flowers of Evil and the prose of Paris Spleen, look (preferably in the original) at “Invitation to the Voyage” in the two books. I make no suggestion that one is better than the other.

Several models for Baudelaire’s prose poetry might easily be brought up, such as “The Centaur” of Maurice de Guérin or something from Alphonse Rabbe’s Album of a Pessimist. Or certain pieces by Poe that Baudelaire himself had translated: “Shadow — A Parable” or “Silence — A Fable.” And even Eureka, which Poe himself had called a “prose poem.” But, as you will notice from the same letter to Houssaye, Baudelaire specifies his model.

ALOYSIUS BERTRAND

Accounts of Aloysius Bertrand’s life (born 1807 as Louis Bertrand) are weighed down with sickness, poverty, lost jobs, unaccepted work. A play was hissed (in Dijon, not Paris), a later play rejected under three different changes of title. The year after Bertrand’s death in 1841, his book of prose poems, Gaspard de la Nuit, written over a period of years, was published, but hardly noticed, the introduction by Sainte-Beuve no doubt responsible for what meager attention it got. The most recent edition I have seen of Gaspard calls Bertrand the “incontestable inventor of the French prose poem.”

The book has, for our concern, an important sub-title, Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot, a slightly altered crib from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s title for a collection of stories, Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner. Hoffmann, composer as well as writer and painter, was using the term fantasy as musicians do: sonata, fugue, waltz . . . all such labels indicate some predetermined structure (as does meter, as does rhyme . . .), whereas a fantasy has no set pattern, but is determined by its own internal development.

Both Hoffmann and Bertrand give a bow to the seventeenth-century artist Jacques Callot, probably to warn readers of grotesqueries they will encounter.