| Tokens of Discontent examines the coining of the modern prose poem in the first half of the nineteenth century, from its inception in the writings of Alphonse Rabbe and Louis Bertrand to its crystallization as a genre with Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris (posth. 1869). Rather than focus on the origin and genealogy of the genre, this study questions the poetic and epistemological significance of the hybrid discursive space opened by the prose poem, viewing it both as a symptom and a product of the shift from a classical system of representation (dominated by the ideal of epic poetry) to a literary modernity characterized by the proliferation of fragmentary writing in the vein of journalistic items of news-in brief and anecdotes.;Based on close readings of poems taken from Rabbe’s Album d’un Pessimiste (posth. 1835-1836) and Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit (posth. 1842), Part One documents the emergence of the modern prose poem in the margins of literary institutions in the period spanning 1820 to 1840, identifying its journalistic origins, its association with provincialism, and its problematic relation to authority as three defining characteristics. Subsequently, it examines Rabbe’s and Bertrand’s use of anecdote as philological conceit to argue that their recuperation of philology, history, and aesthetics served to legitimize the practice of prose poetry as a kind of translation, rather than a poetically licentious invention.;Focusing on the seminal Spleen de Paris, Part Two reads Baudelaire’s theoretical texts, from the Salon of 1846 and essay on laughter to the Painter of Modern Life (1863), in parallel with the prose poems published in the daily press in the last ten years of his life (1855-1867). The primary purpose of these chapters is to describe Baudelaire’s perception of a poetic and epistemological crisis born out of the collapse of the classical order of representation and his attempt to reconcile this realization with the practice of a new poetic idiom that rethinks the relationship between history and poetry, as well as between the genres of drama and epic.;This study conceptualizes the coining of the modern prose poem as a response to a collective aspiration for an epic poetry distinctive to the nineteenth century. Its practice reflects the struggle to formulate a universally legible poetic idiom (a modern legend) able to recapture the experience, at once individual and collective, heroic and banal, politicized and disenfranchised, of life in the urban industrial world. |
