The "Petits Poëmes en Prose" are experiments, and they are also
confessions. "Who of us," says Baudelaire in his dedicatory preface,
"has not dreamed, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic
prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, subtle and staccato
enough to follow the lyric motions of the soul, the wavering outlines
of meditation, the sudden starts of the conscience?" This miracle he
has achieved in these _bagatelles laborieuses_, to use his own words,
these astonishing trifles, in which the art is not more novel, precise
and perfect than the quality of thought and of emotion. In translating
into English a few of these little masterpieces, which have given me so
much delight for so many years, I have tried to be absolutely faithful
to the sense, the words, and the rhythm of the original. A. S.
I