The Century, postbellum America's leading magazine of thought and letters, hardly an outlet for poetic experiment. The opening lines to John Vance Cheney's "In the Lane," from the same issue, better represent the magazine's genteel aesthetics: "And art thou then, my heart, too old / Ever to leap with love again." Yet there it is, sandwiched between "Memoranda on the Civil War" and an article on "The Coinage of the Greeks," signaling its debt to Charles Baudelaire's posthumous, formally innovative, and still-untranslated Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose: Emma Lazarus's seven-poem sequence, "By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose," examining Jewish exilic history and culture from the Spanish Expulsion in 1492 to the present. 1 Among the last poems published in Lazarus's lifetime (she would die of cancer that November), this sequence, alongside her movement toward an historical, document-based poetics, represents an overlooked prehistory to the experimental poetics of the first decades of the twentieth century.These "Little Poems in Prose" are among the earliest examples of the suite of formal practices that, associated with modernism, have come to be called documentary poetics. 2 This sequence suggests an alternate genealogy for the form that does not flow from the experiments of Ezra Pound's early Cantos or the influence of photographic and filmic documentary on poets like Muriel modernism / modernity volume twenty seven, number one, pp 27-49. © 2020 johns hopkins university press