The collection of prose poems known as is an important, puzzling, and yet relatively neglected area of Baudelaire's work. This is the first study in English that is exclusively concerned with these texts. Approaching the poems chronologically, Hiddleston focuses primarily on the position of the artist and his attitude towards his art, the often enigmatic and contradictory moral message the poems purpose to convey and, above all, the relationship between prose and poetry in this hybrid and, by the poet's own admission, "dangerous" genre.