ABSTRACT
Baudelaire's art criticism and literary criticism have, traditionally, offered exegetes an invaluable means of access to the ideas that informed his own poetic practice. If, as Antoine Compagnon contends, the aesthetic governing Les Fleurs du Mal can be associated with the infinite in the finite, and the aesthetic governing the prose with the 'non-fini', then the prose poems might be understood to invite an act of creative completion on the part of their readers. The artist represented in the prose poem 'Le Confiteor de l'artiste' is decisively defeated in his struggle with nature. The artist-narrator of the prose poem would thus seem implicitly to be associated with the excessively faithful art that Baudelaire's art criticism holds in contempt. Indeed, the poet who features in the prose poem seems more interested in expressing his taste for prostitution by forgetting himself in external flesh than by engaging in solitary artistic activity.
