Abstract
In 1999 the French poet Jacques Roubaud publishes an anthology whose title refers to a poem by Baudelaire. It is the anthology La forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur des humains, set of 50 prose poems written between 1991 and 1998 about the city of Paris. This is more than a hypertextual tribute to Baudelaire's poem and then to his revolutionary invention, emblem of modernity, the poem in prose. Using the form inaugurated by Charles Baudelaire, Roubaud confirms what he had already asserted in 1978 in his theoretical and critical studies on verse and poetry and the resulting extension of the domain of poetry. This article aims to show the supreme novelty of the poem in Baudelairean prose, misunderstood in its time but already appreciated by poets and critics whose opinion varies with the passing of the centuries: of text "without foot nor head" (in French "sans queue ni tête"), as the author himself intends, to the critical meta text containing his own theory, emblematic of modernity and whose repercussion remains until today.
The formal analysis of the American researcher Barbara Johnson completes admirably the exhaustive and penetrating reflection of Walter Benjamin on the relations between the poet, the city of Paris, the modern industrial world.
Keywords
poème em prose; poetry; modernity; urbain world
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