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The year 1869 brought something new to the world of literature: the prose poems of the French poet Charles Baudelaire, consisting of fifty pieces of very short prose he wrote during his last dozen years of life. They were published under the title Petits Poemes en Prose, two years after Baudelaire died at the age of forty-six. (1) Most weighed in at a page or two; a few were just single paragraphs.
A hundred years later, I discovered Baudelaire's prose poems as a teenager, shortly after publication of a then-new English translation. (2) According to the translator's introduction to that volume, Baudelaire used prose poetry as "a medium that enabled him to ...