La Poétique huysmansienne du poème en prose Entre théorie et pratique

How can we grasp the contradictions between the theory of the prose poem, developed in À rebours, and Huysmans’s actual practice? The theory formulates an a-generic ideal founded on semantic concentration. Purely theoretical at the level of the word, this concentration is realised at the level of the sentence in Huysmans’s collections. While Des Esseintes simply seeks to flee the real through poetry, Huysmans’s prose poems integrate the prosaic to express the hatred of the real more effectively.