Aloysius Bertrand's "Gaspard de la Nuit" is the founding text of French prose poétique, its short prose pieces achieving lyric intensity, painterly imagery, and sonic richness without recourse to regular meter or rhyme, discovering that poetic density can inhabit prose as fully as verse; Baudelaire's "Petits poèmes en prose," dedicated to Bertrand as their acknowledged master, defines the genre programmatically in its preface: "Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas, dans ses jours d'ambition, rêvé le miracle d'une prose poétique?" Rimbaud's "Illuminations" push prose poétique toward its limits, dissolving the boundary between poetic vision and prose narration in texts that resist all attempts to categorize them as either conventional prose or verse; A student writing prose poétique should attempt to achieve the concentration of imagery, the musicality of rhythm, and the emotional intensity of poetry without using regular meter or rhyme, discovering what specifically poetic qualities can survive the transition into prose; The prose poem's theoretical implications are significant: if poetry can exist without verse, then verse is not the defining feature of poetry but merely one of its possible vehicles, and the question of what distinguishes poetic from non-poetic language must be answered differently; Saint-John Perse's "Anabase" represents a different but equally important strand of prose poétique: where Baudelaire's prose poems are urban and ironic, Perse's are ceremonial and cosmic, using the long breath-unit of the verset to achieve a grandeur that verse poetry rarely matches.