ABSTRACT
Charles Baudelaire's own increasingly antagonistic attitude to the frustrations of modern urban life is a feature of many of his other writings, such as his essay on Theodore de Banville. In Baudelaire's view urban experience stimulates the horizontal movement of dissipation, or what he terms 'vaporization', that is, the dispersal of individual consciousness into its material and social environment. The textual facets of the Baudelairian prose poem to a certain extent draw on a number of visual models. Contemporary critical work on Le Spleen de Paris has revealed that many of the poems in the collection tend to problematize rhetorical consistency and interpretative closure as aspects of poetic discourse. Many of the poems of Le Spleen de Paris are saturated with aural disruptions and intrusions. Under the influence of rhapsodie, the individual's mental associations, although intensely pleasurable, acquire an aleatory quality that confronts him with the possibility of his own self-effacement.
