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Philippe Hamon recently suggested it would be interesting to look at the modalities and value system according to which the 19th century realist text is supposed to have appropriated the notion of still life. This paper follows upon this work by looking at the way the emerging genre of the prose poem is theorised and put into practice, during the same period, with reference to still life in painting. Aloysius Bertrand or Joris-Karl Huysmans refer to the still lives of the 17th century Dutch and Flemish masters in their poems in order to produce series of striking verbal images rather than ekphrasis. Furthermore, the collection, its sub-sections and its poems, function as textual still lives.