Baudelaire laid the foundations for prose poetry as a genre in the 19th century, but it wasn’t until the avant garde movement in the first half of the 20th century that the prose poem began a widespread emergence on the international scene. The three poets in this volume were major factors in this emergence. Max Jacob (1876–1944), a writer of surrealist cubist fables; Francis Ponge (1899–1988), a master of the language of things; and Jean Follain (1903–1971), who merged the everyday with the historical to create a world rich in anniversaries, lead us to the strong and growing interest in the genre that we find so prevalent at the beginning of the 21st century.
