Seth Whidden is a Professor of French at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in French at The Queen's College, Oxford. His research is focused on French literature of the nineteenth century, in particular on poetry. His publications include the monographs Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud and Authority in Crisis in French Literature, 1850-1880, the biography Arthur Rimbaud, and translations and critical editions. He is the editor of Nineteenth-Century French Studies.

• Introduction: The Miracle of Prose Poetry


• 1: Seeing Things in Poetry


• 2: Speech, Interrupting Poetic Prose


• 3: The Dialect of Modernity


• 4: Inebriations and Irritations


• Epilogue: The Prose Poem after Le Spleen de Paris


• Bibliography

A study of Charles Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris (1859) that explores how the practice of reading prose poems might be different from reading poetry in verse. It illustrates how Baudelaire wrote texts that he considered poems and how this form shows aspects of his poetic modernity.