Baudelaire's “Dark Zone”: The Poème en Prose As Social Hieroglyph; or The Beginning and the End of Commodity Aesthetics

Lyric poetry collides with the prose of history in Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose (1869), one of modernité's inaugural aesthetic projects. While the “prose poem” persists today with its own canons, anthologies, and journals, Baudelaire's poème en prose remains irreducible to the genre it is typically said to have originated. This essay makes a case for the generic singularity of Baudelaire's poème en prose by way of Paul de Man and Theodor Adorno, whose oblique references to Baudelaire's innovation are rich in unexamined implications, implications which illuminate the work of both theorists as much as they help us to understand the stakes of Baudelaire's prosaic experiment. The essay goes on to argue that modern lyric's rarefied aim for an autonomy beyond language's referential function persists critically, albeit paradoxically, in the seeming transparency of the Petits poèmes en prose, where poem and commodity collapse in an internal identification, while maintaining the distinctions of external disparities.