Poésie en prose et prose poétique Le cas du Drageoir aux épices de Huysmans

Following Bertrand (Gaspard de la Nuit) and Baudelaire (Petits poèmes en prose), Huysmans tried his hand, in Le Drageoir aux épices (1874), at prose poetry. A “bric-a-brac” collection, Le Drageoir elaborates an aesthetic around the notion of the limit: between poetry and prose, between the arts, between the self and the world. Interrogating the “arbitrary distinction of genre”, to use Hugo’s formula, Huysmans develops a taste for the transgression, both formal and aesthetic, which will characterise his novelistic œuvre.