ABSTRACT
At the beginning of his 1861 essay on Wagner, Baudelaire makes the following intriguing statement. Wing writes that 'Baudelaire's prose poems fascinate or irritate, depending upon the reader's predilections, in part because of the many discursive contrasts and incompatibilities within and among these texts.' It may be that the various inconsistencies apparent in the prose poems testify to the effects of cerebral syphilis, to the pure perversity of a poet who famously claimed the right to contradict himself, or simply to a desire to give voice to different facets of the self. Certainly, Baudelaire's writing often expresses an extreme antipathy towards his public, particularly in the aftermath of the trial of Les Fleurs du Mal. It is possible that Baudelaire's resentment at the public's confusion of his own person with the subject matter of the verse collection gave rise to an ironic response in the form of prose poems that actually invite a similar misrecognition.
