"Always be a poet, even in prose"
About this Quote
A command disguised as a whisper: don’t let the world’s most common forms of language flatten you. Baudelaire’s “Always be a poet, even in prose” isn’t just an aesthetic preference; it’s a survival tactic for modern life, where prose stands in for the everyday - journalism, bureaucracy, conversation, commerce - and where the mind is constantly pressured to speak in the dead idiom of utility.
Baudelaire knew the stakes. Writing in mid-19th-century Paris, he watched the city modernize into a machine of speed, spectacle, and alienation. His project in Les Fleurs du mal and the prose poems of Paris Spleen was to make lyric intensity portable: to smuggle music, metaphor, and moral weather into the very forms that claim they don’t need it. The line is basically a dare to refuse the false neutrality of “plain speech.” Prose pretends to be transparent; Baudelaire insists it’s already full of choices, power, and mood. If you’re going to use it, you might as well use it deliberately.
The subtext is almost combative: poetic perception is not a genre, it’s a stance. Be exact about sensation. Make the sentence do more than deliver information. Keep the capacity for surprise alive. Under Baudelaire’s cynicism sits a romantic insistence that attention can be radical. In a culture that rewards the easily processed, he’s arguing for the right to be difficult in the best sense: not obscure, but awake.
Baudelaire knew the stakes. Writing in mid-19th-century Paris, he watched the city modernize into a machine of speed, spectacle, and alienation. His project in Les Fleurs du mal and the prose poems of Paris Spleen was to make lyric intensity portable: to smuggle music, metaphor, and moral weather into the very forms that claim they don’t need it. The line is basically a dare to refuse the false neutrality of “plain speech.” Prose pretends to be transparent; Baudelaire insists it’s already full of choices, power, and mood. If you’re going to use it, you might as well use it deliberately.
The subtext is almost combative: poetic perception is not a genre, it’s a stance. Be exact about sensation. Make the sentence do more than deliver information. Keep the capacity for surprise alive. Under Baudelaire’s cynicism sits a romantic insistence that attention can be radical. In a culture that rewards the easily processed, he’s arguing for the right to be difficult in the best sense: not obscure, but awake.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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