Prose poetry
Prose poetry is a unique literary form that combines elements of poetry and prose, presenting poetry without traditional line breaks, which gives it a prose-like appearance. This style allows for the expression of poetic emotions, lyricism, and rhythm, utilizing the full range of poetic devices such as imagery, repetition, and sound techniques like alliteration and assonance. Prose poems can vary greatly in length, from a single paragraph to multiple pages, making them challenging to define categorically. Originating in the mid-19th century, notably through the works of French poet Charles Baudelaire, prose poetry has sparked ongoing debate among literary scholars regarding its classification and value, particularly in the English-speaking world. While some dismiss it as "lyrical essay" or "flash fiction," others embrace its experimental nature and emotional depth. The genre encourages writers to play with punctuation, sentence structure, and rhythm, often blurring the lines between sense and sound. Ultimately, prose poetry invites creative exploration, allowing poets to convey complex thoughts and feelings without the constraints of traditional poetic forms.
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Prose poetry
Prose poetry is poetry written without line breaks so that it appears to be short prose. The writing style is differentiated from prose in that it may contain poetry’s emotion, lyricism, and rhythm. The poet may use all the devices of poetry, such as imagery, repetition, alliteration, assonance, and consonance. Prose poetry may be as short as one paragraph or several pages long. It may vary in many other ways as well, making the form difficult to define. Although the form was popular in France, the English-speaking literary world strongly disagreed as to whether it was in fact poetry until about 1990. Many continued to insist that these compositions were better defined as “lyrical essay” or “flash fiction.” Discussion about the relevance and value of English and American prose poetry and how it should be defined has not abated in the twenty-first century.
Background
Poetry has been a craft of invention for thousands of years. The earliest manifestations emerged hundreds of years before the development of written languages. These were oral poems that helped people recall their history, traditions, religious beliefs, laws, ancestry, and more. The earliest known form was the epic poem, which dates to about the twentieth century BCE. These long-form poems were memorized and shared by storytellers. Storytellers likely structured these tales into stanzas as they paused to take breaths, emphasize points, or collect their thoughts.
Poetry was essential to early cultures because of its importance in imparting knowledge as well as its entertainment value. Social gatherings were opportunities for communities to share the experience of hearing poetry. In some cases, people sang all or parts of poems. New poetic forms emerged over time. These included dramatic verse in ancient Greece, courtly poems of the Middle Ages, and the sonnets of the Renaissance.
Writing traditional poetry with line breaks offers many advantages to the poet. Such structure allows the writer to control the pace, separate ideas, emphasize certain words, and use rhyme schemes and meter. Artists in every era push the boundaries of their media, however, and poetry is no exception. In Paris and London in the early nineteenth century, intellectuals sought greater freedom. Trailblazing poets abandoned strict meter, rhyme, and stanza rules and invented free verse.
The prose poem emerged from this era of experimentation. The form dates to the 1850s, when French poet Charles Baudelaire began publishing prose poems. Fifty were published posthumously in 1869 in the collection Paris Spleen. Baudelaire had a long history of challenging literary conventions. Six of the poems in his 1857 collection The Flowers of Evil were banned in France on the grounds that their erotic realism incited indecent excitement of the senses.
Another collection of French prose poems, Pastels in Prose by Stuart Merrill, was translated and published in New York in 1890. Its prose poetry drew the interest of English and American writers. Oscar Wilde’s Poems in Prose was published four years later.
In the early twentieth century, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, authors known for pushing the boundaries, produced works in this genre. Stein called her short poetic works “still lifes” or “portraits.” She attempted to capture a feature about her subjects with these portraits. “Picasso,” for example, comprises multiple paragraphs whose sentences differ in only minute ways. For example, one sentence reads “One whom some were certainly following was one who was completely charming” and the next reads “One whom some were certainly following was one who was charming.”
Throughout the twentieth century, various poets produced works of prose poetry, yet this form remained controversial. The 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was to be awarded to Mark Strand for the prose poetry work The Monument but one of the three judges on the committee adamantly opposed the decision, and it was reversed. Twelve years later, Charles Simic received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his prose poem collection The World Doesn’t End. Despite such mainstream acceptance, many literary scholars and critics remained unconvinced of the validity of the prose poem.
Overview
Writers, editors, and publications have sought to define prose poems, yet no clear definition can suffice because the genre and its poets defy boundaries. Very general guidelines include brevity (usually shorter than four pages), lack of confinement by formatting such as line breaks, reliance on rhythm and internal rhyme, and lack of extraneous words. The works may seem nonsensical but may instead be musical or emotional. Furthermore, poets are open to experimentation, varying use of punctuation, capitalization, and sentence structure as needed and exploring thoughts in surprising ways. As with other forms of literature, sonic devices such as alliteration and patterns of short and long sentences create rhythm within the work.
Some techniques are helpful in creating prose poetry. Some writers say that capturing one’s stream of consciousness by simply writing each thought that comes to mind may be useful. Some scholars believe that prose poetry is closely related to the writer’s psyche.
Although the poet is not constrained by meter, stanzas, or other classically poetical structures, the poet may use techniques to imbue the prose with poetic qualities. Literary devices and sound devices help to create the emotion and sound of the work. Among these devices are alliteration, anaphora, consonance, euphony, internal rhyme, juxtaposition, metaphor, and symbolism. Punctuation and sentence structure make the work readable and help to create rhythm. The use of colons and semicolons, for example, allows the poet to group like or different ideas within a single sentence, while dashes can capture the feeling of stream-of-consciousness writing that makes leaps between disjointed thoughts and images. Sentence length helps to determine the tone and rhythm.
The writer may choose language for the sound or mood it creates rather than for the literal or symbolic meaning of the words. This may be a part of the stream-of-consciousness exercise. After the words have been chosen, the poet may rewrite the work so it makes more sense or may choose to focus entirely on improving the sound of the work. The prose poem need not make sense, but it should not be confusing.
Bibliography
Delville, Michel. The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre. University of Florida Press, 1998.
Glatch, Sean. “What Is a Prose Poem? Understanding Prose Poetry.” Writers.com, 11 July 2023, writers.com/prose-poetry-definition. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.
Hetherington, Paul, and Cassandra Atherton. Prose Poetry: An Introduction. Princeton University Press, 2020.
MacKenzie, Vicky. “What is Prose Poetry?” The Open College of the Arts, 10 Apr. 2017, www.oca.ac.uk/weareoca/creative-writing/what-is-prose-poetry/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.
Mitchell, Danielle. “The Poet’s Revolt: A Brief Guide to the Prose Poem.” DIYMFA, 30 Apr. 2014, diymfa.com/writing/poets-revolt-brief-guide-prose-poem/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.
Murphy, Margueritte S. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery. University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
“Poetry’s Place in the History of Banned Books.” Academy of American Poets, 3 Oct. 2023, poets.org/text/poetrys-place-history-banned-books. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.
Stohlman, Nancy. “Five Reasons to Write Flash Fiction: Understanding the Literary Love Child of the Short Story and Poetry.” Writer’s Digest, 31 Oct. 2020, www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/five-reasons-to-write-flash-fiction-understanding-the-literary-love-child-of-the-short-story-and-poetry. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.