'Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose' (PP 30) ['Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas, dans ses jours d'ambition, rêevé le miracle d'une prose poétique' (OC i 275)], asks Baudelaire in his letter to Arsène Houssaye, before going on to gloss - within his question - just what he means by poetic prose:

This is the question with which Baudelaire inaugurates his prose poetry enterprise and, if Baudelaire's prose poetry has attracted increasing attention over the last twenty years and come to rival, in terms of recent scholarship at least, the verse poetry for which he is best known, then it is in no small part a result of the playful questions that this innovative work raises. Indeed, the questions are legion, not only in the critical studies of Le Spleen de Paris, but in the very fabric of the poetry itself. The questions the poems pose are often, like this one about prose poetry, rhetorical inasmuch as they expect no answer from the interlocutor. Real questions are socially mandating (if we don’t answer, we offend): they solicit a response.