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What Is The Difference Between Prose and Poetry?

• Published August 31, 2022

Poetry is an art form that has been around for centuries. It is a way to express oneself through the use of words and can be written in many different styles. There are many different types of poetry, such as sonnets, haikus, and ballads.

Poetry can be written about any topic, and it is often used to express emotions. But what is the difference between poetry and prose?

In this article, we outline the differences between the two popular forms of story-telling.

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Poetry VS Prose

Prose is a form of writing that is based on spoken language. It is characterised by its natural flow and rhythm, as well as its use of regular grammar and punctuation. Prose is often used for novels, short stories, and essays.

Poetry, on the other hand, is a form of writing that is based on musicality and rhythm. It is often characterized by its use of figurative languages, such as metaphors and similes. Poetry is often used for poems and some of its devices are also used in songwriting.

The major difference between the two is that poetry is a form of writing that uses rhythm and rhyme to create a musical or chant-like effect, whereas prose, is a form of writing that is more straightforward and doesn’t rely on rhyme or meter.

Poetry often uses figurative language to create images or expressive ideas, while prose is more literal. Prose is usually used for novels, essays, and nonfiction writing, while poetry is more often associated with literature, lyrics, and storytelling.

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Though the name of the form may appear to be a contradiction, the prose poem essentially appears as prose, but reads like poetry. In the first issue of  The Prose Poem: An International Journal , editor Peter Johnson explained, "Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels."

While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects.

History of the Prose Poem Form

Though examples of prose passages in poetic texts can be found in early Bible translations and the  Lyrical Ballads  of  William Wordsworth , the form is most often traced to nineteenth-century French symbolists writers. The advent of the form in the work of Aloysius Bertrand and  Charles Baudelaire  marked a significant departure from the strict separation between the genres of prose and poetry at the time. A fine example of the form is Baudelaire's  "Be Drunk,"  which concludes:

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

The form quickly spread to innovative literary circles in other coutries:  Rainer Maria Rilke  and Franz Kafka in Germany; Jorge Luis Borges,  Pablo Neruda , and  Octavio Paz  in Latin America; and  William Carlos Williams  and  Gertrude Stein  in the United States. Each group of writers adapted the form and developed their own rules and restrictions, ultimately expanding the definitions of the prose poem.

Among contemporary American writers, the form is widely popular and can be found in work by poets from a diverse range of movements and styles, including  James Wright ,  Russell Edson , and  Charles Simic . Campbell McGrath’s winding and descriptive  "The Prose Poem"  is a recent example of the form; it begins:

On the map it is precise and rectilinear as a chessboard, though driving past you would hardly notice it, this boundary line or ragged margin, a shallow swale that cups a simple trickle of water, less rill than rivulet, more gully than dell, a tangled ditch grown up throughout with a fearsome assortment of wildflowers and bracken. There is no fence, though here and there a weathered post asserts a former claim, strands of fallen wire taken by the dust. To the left a cornfield carries into the distance, dips and rises to the blue sky, a rolling plain of green and healthy plants aligned in close order, row upon row upon row.

There are several anthologies devoted to the prose poem, including  Traffic: New and Selected Prose Poems  and  Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present , as well as the study of the form in  The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundries of Genre .

read more prose poems

From  A Poet’s Glossary

The following additional definition of the term  prose poem  is reprinted from  A Poet's Glossary  by Edward Hirsch.

A composition printed as prose that names itself poetry. The prose poem takes advantage of its hybrid nature — it avails itself of the elements of prose (what  Dryden  called “the other harmony of prose”) while foregrounding the devices of poetry. The French writer Aloysius Bertrand established the prose poem as a minor genre in  Gaspard de la nuit  (1842), a book that influenced  Baudelaire ’s  Petits poèmes en prose  (1869).  Baudelaire used prose poems to rebel against the straitjacket of classical French versification. He dreamed of creating “a poetic prose, musical without rhyme or rhythm, supple and jerky enough to adapt to the lyric movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie, to the somersaults of conscience.” Baudelaire’s prose poems — along with  Rimbaud ’s  Les Illuminations  (1886) and  Mallarmé ’s  Divagations  (1897) — created a mixed musical form (part social, part transcendental) that has been widely and internationally practiced in the twentieth century. “There is no such thing as prose,” Mallarmé insisted in 1891. “There is the alphabet, and then there are verses which are more or less closely knit, more or less diffuse. So long as there is a straining toward style, there is versification.”

Read the rest of the definition here .

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What’s the Difference Between Poetry and Prose?

19 Feb, 2024 | Blog Articles , English Language Articles , Get the Edge , Humanities Articles , Writing Articles

What are the key elements of poetry?

1. figurative language.

Figurative language quite simply means language that is not literal. This type of language is descriptive, and poets often use it to link a concrete object with an abstract idea. This non-literal description is used to invoke the reader’s emotions. 

A metaphor, for example, is a figurative technique; “the world is your oyster,” and “I could eat a horse,” are common metaphors. 

A simile is another example of figurative language. This is where the poet compares one thing with another to strengthen a description: for example in the final line of Sylvia Plath’s Mirror : 

“In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” 

Personification, the attribution of human characteristics to something non-human (e.g. “the wind howled”), and symbolism, the use of symbols to represent ideas or qualities, are also figurative techniques. 

These all serve to draw mental associations between the concrete and the abstract, and enhance the imagery of the poem. 

2. Rhythm and Metre

Poetry also often employs rhythmic patterns and metre. Rhythm refers to the rhythmic structure of a line, composed of two or more syllables, while metre is used to describe the pattern of emphasis, or lack of emphasis, on each syllable. Poets choose different rhythms and metres to impact the musical quality of the poem. 

For example, iambic pentameter is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama – most famously in the works of Shakespeare. 

Rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called “feet”. “Iambic” refers to the type of foot used: an “iamb” is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (e.g. the word “a-bove”). This creates the pattern: 

de/DUM de/DUM de/DUM de/DUM de/DUM 

“Pentameter” indicates that each line has five “feet” (think pent- as in “pentagon”, a shape with five sides). 

Consider Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream : 

“And I do love thee. Therefore go with me. I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee, And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep.” 

3. Line Breaks and Stanzas

Structure in poetry concerns how the poem’s different elements are organised. This includes: 

• Stanzas – a group of lines forming the basic recurring metrical unit in a poem; a.k.a a verse
• Line breaks
• Verse lengths 

Each impacts the way the reader experiences and interprets the poem.

For example, the Petrarchan sonnet organises itself into an octave, followed by a sestet. The first eight lines (often in ABBA ABBA rhyming scheme) raise a question that the next six lines, the sestet, answers. 

There’s typically a volta , or a turn, at the beginning of the sestet, indicating the change in the poem’s focus. Here, the way the poem’s stanzas are laid out can have a significant impact on the way the poem is read. 

These poems often concern love, and the volta in particular allows for narrative development in the poem. 

See Christina Rossetti’s After Death : 

“The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay, Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept. He leaned above me, thinking that I slept And could not hear him; but I heard him say, ‘Poor child, poor child’: and as he turned away Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.   He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold That hid my face, or take my hand in his, Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head: He did not love me living; but once dead He pitied me; and very sweet it is To know he still is warm though I am cold.”

Line breaks also influence the way the poem is interpreted. In After Death, Rossetti employs enjambment (when a phrase flows seamlessly from one line to the next with no punctuation) to reflect the continuity of domestic life. 

4. Rhyme and Sound Patterns

Rhyme schemes, assonance, consonance and alliteration all draw attention to individual words within a poem. These words are drawn together through the repeated use of sound. 

For example, alliteration is the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words. In The Raven , Edgar Allan Poe uses plosive alliteration in the phrase “doubting, dreaming dreams”. 

Sibilance, the creation of a hissing sound by the repetition of the letter “s”, is also used:

“Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore”. 

Assonance, the rhyming of two or more stressed vowels in nearby words, creates a sense of rhythm, dictating which syllables should be stressed when the poem is read aloud. It’s also employed in The Raven : 

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary”.

A poem’s rhyme scheme, the pattern that outlines which sound each line should end with, lends poetry its tell-tale rhythmic structure. For example, the ABAB rhyme scheme rhymes the end of every other line. 

See the opening stanza of Robert Frost’s Neither Out Far Nor in Deep :

“The people along the sand All turn and look one way. They turn their back on the land. They look at the sea all day.”

Poets often put a rhyme scheme in place, only to break the pattern half-way through. This can work like a volta to indicate a shift in the narrative or to emphasise a particular thematic point. 

Imagery is the poet’s use of vivid description and language to enrich the reader’s understanding and appreciation of the piece. 

See the opening of T.S. Eliot’s Preludes :

“The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots;” 

The array of images conjured elevates the scene, as if we too are there in the street, with leaves at our feet and the smell of smoky steaks at our noses! 

6. Emotional Resonance

Poets also use literary techniques to express strong or intense emotions, which can deeply resonate with readers.

In Daffodils, William Wordsworth uses simple language to evoke loneliness, wonder and felicity: 

“I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” 

Similarly, Audre Lorde’s If They Come in the Morning expresses a sense of danger and doom, as well as solidarity:

““If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

She uses the personal pronouns “you” and “we” to connect to the reader, strengthening our connection to the poem and its sentiments.

7. Ambiguity

Poetry can initially be difficult to interpret and understand due to its ambiguity. Oftentimes students find it hard to connect to a poem, and in turn lose enthusiasm for poetry as a literary form. 

However, ambiguity is part of what makes poems so resonant, interesting and evocative! Readers can engage with the poem on multiple levels and connect to the words more personally – ambiguity allows room for interpretation. 

As William Empson wrote in his book Seven Types of Ambiguity : 

“The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.”

8. Lyrical Language

Lyric poems use a variety of techniques to produce a songlike quality. 

A sonnet is a popular form of lyric poetry, using its rhythm, structure and descriptions to enhance its beauty and likeness to a song. For example, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 is notably lyrical, a quality that enhances the romantic and sentimental nature of the poem. 

9. Distinct Forms

There are a variety of poetic forms, including sonnets, haikus, villanelles and odes. 

Haikus are a Japanese form of poetry characterised by their unique syllabic structure. Each haiku is composed of three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. 

For example, here is one of the Japanese poet Bashō’s earliest haikus: 

“On a withered branch A crow has alighted; Nightfall in autumn.”

A villanelle is a French verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas.

What Is Prose?

Prose is a form of written language without the metrical structure and formal patterns that characterise poetry. 

What are the key elements that characterise prose? 

1. narrative and exposition.

Prose is commonly used to convey information, tell stories and provide explanations, making it a versatile form of written expression. All novels are examples of the prose form. 

Think of the Harry Potter series. Through prose, we’re told the story of a young boy who discovers he is a wizard, attends the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, meets his friends, learns spells and battles Voldemort. 

As a versatile form, prose doesn’t just tell stories. It can convey other types of information through news articles, recipes or school essays.

2. Full Sentences and Paragraphs

Prose adheres to grammatical and syntactical rules, consisting of complete sentences and paragraphs. This is in direct contrast with poetry’s experimentation with rhythm, line breaks and metre. 

3. Lack of Rhyme and Metre

There’s generally a notable absence of specific rhythmic patterns and structured metre in prose. This allows for a more fluid and natural flow of language – just as I am writing now! 

For example, the prose form allows dialogue in novels to feel natural and real. This extract from Ernest Hemingway’s Hills like White Elephants is a great example, as the dialogue effectively bounces back and forth between characters.

‘“Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.”   “And you really want to?”   “I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you really don’t want to.”   “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?”   “I love you now. You know I love you.”   “I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?”   “I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.”   “If I do it you won’t ever worry?”   “I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.”’

4. Concise and Detailed

Prose can be both concise and straightforward to deliver a message (for example a how-to guide), or descriptive and detailed to depict scenes and characters in literature. 

See the opening of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre : 

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.”

5. Logical and Coherent

Prose is generally organised logically with a coherent development of ideas. This means it’s very suitable for persuasive writing, argument and clarity. 

See any of Barack Obama’s speeches – he’s a skilled and persuasive writer and speaker, able to use language to suit his purpose and audience. 

6. Linear Narrative

Prose often follows a linear narrative structure, progressing chronologically from beginning to middle to end, while making use of narrative techniques. 

For example, tragedies often adhere to Freytag’s Pyramid, which follows the structure: 

• Introduction, 
• Rise, or rising action 
• Return, or fall
• Catastrophe

This formula is based upon the classical Greek tragedies of Sophocles , Aeschylus and Euripedes .

7. Versatility

Prose adapts to a wide range of genres and styles from creative fiction to academic research papers to a newspaper column. It’s the primary, and most versatile, form of written communication.

Blurring Boundaries Between Poetry and Prose

Although there are many differences between poetry and prose, these distinctions can sometimes blur. 

There are hybrid forms of writing which incorporate elements of both styles. For example, the French poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionised poetry in his prose poems, combining elements of both styles. Rather than incorporating line breaks, rhyme schemes, control of metre or assonance, Baudelaire employed conventions of prose writing such as paragraphs and dialogue. 

This created a condensed version of prose that took advantage of poetic devices like symbolism and imagery. Take a look at Baudelaire’s Be Drunk : 

“And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

Other writers who blur this boundary include Claudia Rankine, whose novel ​ Citizen showcases her prose-poetry hybrid. Her work has been called “lyric essays” by the New York Review of Books . 

Ocean Vuong’s acclaimed works, strikingly Time Is A Mother , also experiment with poetry and prose to explore grief, loss and memory.

There are many, many more canonical writers that blur this boundary, like Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath – all well worth exploring in depth!

Language is clearly not concrete, nor unchanging. Poets and novelists alike are always experimenting with form, technique and style. 

Be inspired to engage and experiment with a range of literary works, from confessional poetry to postmodernist literature to Baudelaire’s subversive prose poetry! Our summer programmes are hosted in Oxford, home to countless great writers over the centuries, and allow you to explore both poetry and prose in a supportive environment.

By Keziah Mccann

Keziah is a second-year French and Italian student at Balliol College, University of Oxford. As well as learning languages and travelling, her interests include writing, journalism, film and cooking.

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• Key Differences

Know the Differences & Comparisons

Difference Between Prose and Poetry

The basic difference between prose and poetry is that we have sentences and paragraphs, whereas lines and stanzas can be found in a poetry. Further, there is regular writing in prose, but there is a unique style of writing a poetry.

We can find prose in newspaper articles, blogs, short stories, etc., however, poetry is used to share something special, aesthetically. To know more on this topic, you can read the other differences below:

Content: Prose Vs Poetry

Comparison chart, how to remember the difference.

Definition of Prose

The prose is an ordinary writing style in literature, which encompasses characters, plot, mood, theme, the point of view, setting, etc. making it a distinctive form of language. It is written using grammatical sentences, which forms a paragraph. It may also include dialogues, and is sometimes, supported by images but does not have a metrical structure.

Prose can be fictional or non-fictional, heroic, alliterative, village, polyphonic, prose poetry etc.

Biography, autobiography, memoir, essay, short stories, fairy tales, article, novel, blog and so forth use prose for creative writing.

Definition of Poetry

Poetry is something that arouses a complete imaginative feeling, by choosing appropriate language and selective words and arranging them in a manner that creates a proper pattern, rhyme (two or more words having identical ending sounds) and rhythm (cadence of the poem).

Poetry uses an artistic way to communicate something special, i.e. a musical intonation of stressed (long sounding) and unstressed (short sounding) syllables to express or describe emotions, moments, ideas, experiences, feelings and thoughts of the poet to the audience. The structural components of poetry include lines, couplet, strophe, stanza, etc.

It is in the form of verses, which constitutes stanzas, that follows a meter. The number of verses in a stanza depends upon the type of the poem.

Key Differences Between Prose and Poetry

The difference between prose and poetry can be drawn clearly on the following grounds:

• Prose refers to a form of literature, having ordinary language and sentence structure. Poetry is that form of literature, which is aesthetic by nature, i.e. it has a sound, cadence, rhyme, metre, etc., that adds to its meaning.
• The language of prose is quite direct or straightforward. On the other hand, in poetry, we use an expressive or creative language, which includes comparisons, rhyme and rhythm that give it a unique cadence and feel.
• While the prose is pragmatic, i.e. realistic, poetry is figurative.
• Prose contains paragraphs, which includes a number of sentences, that has an implied message or idea. As against, poetry is written in verses, which are covered in stanzas. These verses leave a lot of unsaid things, and its interpretation depends upon the imagination of the reader.
• The prose is utilitarian, which conveys a hidden moral, lesson or idea. Conversely, poetry aims to delight or amuse the reader.
• The most important thing in prose is the message or information. In contrast, the poet shares his/her experience or feelings with the reader, which plays a crucial role in poetry.
• In prose, there are no line breaks, whereas when it comes to poetry, there are a number of line breaks, which is just to follow the beat or to stress on an idea.
• When it comes to paraphrasing or summarizing, both prose and poetry can be paraphrased, but the paraphrase of the poem is not the poem, because the essence of the poem lies in the style of writing, i.e. the way in which the poet has expressed his/her experience in verses and stanzas. So, this writing pattern and cadence is the beauty of poetry, which cannot be summarized.

The best trick to remember the difference between these two is to understand their writing style, i.e. while prose is written ordinarily, poetry has aesthetic features, and so it has a distinctive writing pattern.

Further, the prose is that form of language which expansively conveys a message or meaning by way of a narrative structure. On the contrary, poetry is such a form of literature, with a unique writing format, i.e. it has a pattern, rhyme and rhythm.

In addition to this, prose appears like big blocks of words, whereas the size of poetry may vary as per the line length and the poet’s intention.

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• Literary Terms
• Definition & Examples
• When & How to Write a Prose

I. What is a Prose?

Prose is just non-verse writing. Pretty much anything other than poetry counts as prose: this article, that textbook in your backpack, the U.S. Constitution, Harry Potter – it’s all prose. The basic defining feature of prose is its lack of line breaks:

In verse, the line ends

when the writer wants it to, but in prose

you just write until you run out of room and then start a new line.

Unlike most other literary devices , prose has a negative definition : in other words, it’s defined by what it isn’t rather than by what it is . (It isn’t verse.) As a result, we have to look pretty closely at verse in order to understand what prose is.

II. Types of Prose

Prose usually appears in one of these three forms.

You’re probably familiar with essays . An essay makes some kind of argument about a specific question or topic. Essays are written in prose because it’s what modern readers are accustomed to.

b. Novels/short stories

When you set out to tell a story in prose, it’s called a novel or short story (depending on length). Stories can also be told through verse, but it’s less common nowadays. Books like Harry Potter and the Fault in Our Stars are written in prose.

c. Nonfiction books

If it’s true, it’s nonfiction. Essays are a kind of nonfiction, but not the only kind. Sometimes, a nonfiction book is just written for entertainment (e.g. David Sedaris’s nonfiction comedy books), or to inform (e.g. a textbook), but not to argue. Again, there’s plenty of nonfiction verse, too, but most nonfiction is written in prose.

III. Examples of Prose

The Bible is usually printed in prose form, unlike the Islamic Qur’an, which is printed in verse. This difference suggests one of the differences between the two ancient cultures that produced these texts: the classical Arabs who first wrote down the Qur’an were a community of poets, and their literature was much more focused on verse than on stories. The ancient Hebrews, by contrast, were more a community of storytellers than poets, so their holy book was written in a more narrative prose form.

Although poetry is almost always written in verse, there is such a thing as “prose poetry.” Prose poetry lacks line breaks, but still has the rhythms of verse poetry and focuses on the sound of the words as well as their meaning. It’s the same as other kinds of poetry except for its lack of line breaks.

IV. The Importance of Prose

Prose is ever-present in our lives, and we pretty much always take it for granted. It seems like the most obvious, natural way to write. But if you stop and think, it’s not totally obvious. After all, people often speak in short phrases with pauses in between – more like lines of poetry than the long, unbroken lines of prose. It’s also easier to read verse, since it’s easier for the eye to follow a short line than a long, unbroken one.

For all of these reasons, it might seem like verse is actually a more natural way of writing! And indeed, we know from archaeological digs that early cultures usually wrote in verse rather than prose. The dominance of prose is a relatively modern trend.

So why do we moderns prefer prose? The answer is probably just that it’s more efficient! Without line breaks, you can fill the entire page with words, meaning it takes less paper to write the same number of words. Before the industrial revolution, paper was very expensive, and early writers may have given up on poetry because it was cheaper to write prose.

V. Examples of Prose in Literature

Although Shakespeare was a poet, his plays are primarily written in prose. He loved to play around with the difference between prose and verse, and if you look closely you can see the purpose behind it: the “regular people” in his plays usually speak in prose – their words are “prosaic” and therefore don’t need to be elevated. Heroic and noble characters , by contrast, speak in verse to highlight the beauty and importance of what they have to say.

Flip open Moby-Dick to a random page, and you’ll probably find a lot of prose. But there are a few exceptions: short sections written in verse. There are many theories as to why Herman Melville chose to write his book this way, but it probably was due in large part to Shakespeare. Melville was very interested in Shakespeare and other classic authors who used verse more extensively, and he may have decided to imitate them by including a few verse sections in his prose novel.

VI. Examples of Prose in Pop Culture

Philosophy has been written in prose since the time of Plato and Aristotle. If you look at a standard philosophy book, you’ll find that it has a regular paragraph structure, but no creative line breaks like you’d see in poetry. No one is exactly sure why this should be true – after all, couldn’t you write a philosophical argument with line breaks in it? Some philosophers, like Nietzsche, have actually experimented with this. But it hasn’t really caught on, and the vast majority of philosophy is still written in prose form.

In the Internet age, we’re very familiar with prose – nearly all blogs and emails are written in prose form. In fact, it would look pretty strange if this were not the case!

Imagine if you had a professor

who wrote class emails

in verse form, with odd

            line breaks in the middle

of the email.

VII. Related Terms

Verse is the opposite of prose: it’s the style of writing

that has line breaks.

Most commonly used in poetry, it tends to have rhythm and rhyme but doesn’t necessarily have these features. Anything with artistic line breaks counts as verse.

18 th -century authors saw poetry as a more elevated form of writing – it was a way of reaching for the mysterious and the heavenly. In contrast, prose was for writing about ordinary, everyday topics. As a result, the adjective “prosaic” (meaning prose-like) came to mean “ordinary, unremarkable.”

Prosody is the pleasing sound of words when they come together. Verse and prose can both benefit from having better prosody, since this makes the writing more enjoyable to a reader.

List of Terms

• Alliteration
• Amplification
• Anachronism
• Anthropomorphism
• Antonomasia
• APA Citation
• Aposiopesis
• Autobiography
• Bildungsroman
• Characterization
• Circumlocution
• Cliffhanger
• Comic Relief
• Connotation
• Deus ex machina
• Deuteragonist
• Doppelganger
• Double Entendre
• Dramatic irony
• Equivocation
• Extended Metaphor
• Figures of Speech
• Flash-forward
• Foreshadowing
• Intertextuality
• Juxtaposition
• Literary Device
• Malapropism
• Onomatopoeia
• Parallelism
• Pathetic Fallacy
• Personification
• Point of View
• Polysyndeton
• Protagonist
• Red Herring
• Rhetorical Device
• Rhetorical Question
• Science Fiction
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Synesthesia
• Turning Point
• Understatement
• Urban Legend
• Verisimilitude
• Essay Guide
• Cite This Website

Essay on the Prose Poem by Charles Simic

I’m grateful to Peter Johnson for bringing Charles Simic’s brilliant, unpublished “Essay on the Prose Poem” to my attention. Although Simic wrote this essay ten years ago, twenty one years after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of prose poems titled The World Does Not End, it reads as freshly today as it did in 2010. Rife with Simic’s signature sprezzatura, it flows with enlightening commentary on the prose poem’s anomalous “form,” along with a bit of personal history behind his first impulse to write prose poetry in 1958, which he recalls had to do with “nerve.” “You just go on your nerve,” he remembers Frank O’Hara saying. “If someone is chasing you down the street with a knife, you just run.” And so he did, discovering a new paradoxical muse who carries a dual passport for traveling in the hybrid territory that prose poet master Russell Edson simply called “poetry mind.” Simic has traveled there ever since, while also continuing to write in lines. In explaining the prose poem’s enduring ironic appeal and validity as a legitimate poetic mode, Simic opines, “They “look like prose and act like poems because, despite the odds, they make themselves into fly-traps for our imagination.”

–Chard DeNiord

Essay on the Prose Poem by Charles Simic, delivered on June 1, 2010 at The Poetry Festival in Rotterdam

“. . . a cast-iron airplane that can actually fly, mainly because its pilot doesn’t seem to care if it does or not”

—Russell Edson

Prose poetry has been around for almost two centuries and still no one has managed to explain properly what it is. The customary definitions merely state that it is poetry written in prose and leave it at that. For many readers, such a concept is not just absurd but a blasphemy against everything they love about poetry. Free verse, of course, still has its opponents, but no one in their right mind would maintain that all genuine poetry must adhere to rhyme schemes or regular meters. It’s an entirely different matter when it comes to prose poetry. When a book of mine consisting entirely of poems in prose received the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, there was considerable protest from some of our more conservative literary critics, who demanded to know how a prize meant to honor poetry could be given to something that by definition is not poetry. I didn’t bother to defend myself from my detractors, but if I had, and had told them the true story of how the poems in  The World Doesn’t End  got written, they would have been even more outraged. Here then, finally, is my confession: I never once in my life sat down to write a prose poem. In other words, everything in that book came to me as if by accident.

I knew a number of my contemporaries who wrote prose poems and I liked what they wrote, but, for me, the writing of poetry was always about form and the struggle to fit words inside a line or a stanza. My notebooks are full of passages of verse endlessly revised and often crossed out. They also contained, in the years preceding the publication of that book, other kinds of writing that looked like narrative fragments, along with ideas for poems consisting of isolated phrases and images strung together.

It is my habit to revisit old notebooks from time to time and see if any of the drafts I’ve left behind can be salvaged. I never paid any attention to this other stuff, though, until the summer of 1988 when I inherited a computer from my son and decided to teach myself how to use it, and in the process store my poems on disks. One day, not having anything else to do, and since I suddenly liked how they sounded, I read and copied a few of these short passages of prose. By the time I had gone through a dozen notebooks, I had some one hundred and twenty pieces, most no longer than a few short paragraphs. Nevertheless, I begin to think that I might have a book there. After fussing over them for several months and reducing the manuscript to sixty-eight pieces, I showed it to my editor, who, to my surprise, offered to publish it. Oddly, it was only then that the question of what to call these little pieces came up. “Don’t call them anything,” I told my editor. “You have to call them  something ,” she explained to me, “so that the bookstore knows under what heading to shelve the book.” After giving it some thought, and with some uneasiness on my part, we decided to call them prose poems.

Once I reacquainted myself with these pieces, I began to recall something of the circumstances in which they had been written. A few words, a phrase, or an image had set me off and I had scribbled down quickly whatever came to my mind. As Frank O’Hara said, “You just go on your nerve. If someone is chasing you down the street with a knife, you just run.” For instance, one of the oldest dates back to 1958 when I was living in a rooming house in Greenwich Village and heard one night someone mutter outside my door, “Our goose is cooked.” Another one of these “poems” was a reaction to being asked by a publisher to compose a small memoir of my childhood. Thinking about this period of my life, and worrying about my ability to remember accurately many important events and understand their meaning, I realised how much more satisfying for me and the reader it would be if I made everything up. Here is what I wrote:

I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.

It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.

The hardest thing for poets is to free themselves from their own habitual way of seeing the world and find ways to surprise themselves. That’s what I liked about these pieces. They seemed effortless and, like all prose poems, came, as James Tate once said, in “deceptively simple packaging: the paragraph”. They were unpremeditated, and yet they could stand alone and even had a crazy logic of their own. I was having fun, of course. All poets do magic tricks. In prose poetry, pulling rabbits out of a hat is one of the primary impulses. This has to be done with spontaneity and nonchalance, concealing art and giving the impression that one writes without effort and almost without thinking − what Castiglione in his sixteenth-century  Book of the Courtier  called  sprezzatura . As such, prose poetry can be regarded as a remedy for every bane of affectation.

Once I mulled over these pieces of mine, I realized that they were not without precedent. I was well-acquainted with the thick international anthology,  The Prose Poem , which my late friend Michael Benedikt edited and published back in 1976. Starting with Aloysius Bertrand, the reader of this book encountered sixty-nine other practitioners of the art from all parts of the world. In addition to the the familiar names like Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Jacob, Michaux, Ponge, there were lesser known ones like Kunnert, Cortázar and Björling, as well as total unknowns like Kharms, Arreola, Hagiwara, and many others. In his introduction to the anthology, Benedikt did not try to account for these differences, or even to attempt an extended definition, saying predictably that prose poetry is a genre of poetry written in prose, characterized by the intense use of virtually all devices of poetry except for the line break.

I would have placed emphasis on the subversive character of prose poetry. For me, it is a kind of writing determined to prove that there’s poetry beyond verse and its rules. Most often it has an informal, playful air, like the rapid, unfinished caricatures left behind on café napkins. Prose poetry depends on a collision of two impulses, those for poetry and those for prose, and it can either have a quiet meditative air or feel like a performance in a three-ring circus. It is savvy about the poetry of the past, but it thumbs its nose at verse that is too willed and too self-consciously significant. It mocks poetry by calling attention to the foolishness of its earnestness. Here in the United States, where poets speak with reverence of authentic experience and write poems about their dads taking them fishing when they were little, telling the reader even the name of the river and the kind of car they drove that day to make it sound more believable, one longs for poems in which imagination runs free and where tragedy and comedy can be shuffled as if they belonged in the same pack of cards.

In the 2009 anthology  An Introduction to the Prose Poem  published in the United States, the editors Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham attempt to classify the various kinds of prose poems in existence. Some of the twenty-four types they discuss and give examples of are more persuasive than others. Certainly, the use of anecdote, fable, autobiography, extended metaphor, parable, description of inanimate objects, journal entries, lists and dialogue have been frequently noted, but as Michel Delville has pointed out, often a poem may suggest a genre at the outset only to shed its guise and become something entirely different by its end. He also wonders whether there may be as many kinds of prose poems as there are practitioners. I agree. How do you describe a genre that declares total verbal freedom and about which every generalization one makes tends to be contradicted by a poem that has none of the properties one has just spelled out? As Russell Edson has written, “If the finished prose poem is considerate a piece of literature, this is quite incidental to the writing.” What makes us so fond of it, he says elsewhere, is its clumsiness, its lack of expectation or ambition.

Blue Notebook Number 10

There was once a red-haired man who had no eyes and no ears. He also had no hair, so he was called red-haired only in a manner of speaking. He wasn’t able to talk, because he didn’t have a mouth. He had no nose, either. He didn’t even have any arms or legs. He also didn’t have a stomach and he didn’t have a back, and he didn’t have a spine, and he also didn’t have any other insides. He didn’t have anything. So it’s hard to understand who we’re talking about. So we’d better not talk about him anymore.

(translated by George Gibian)

The old Russian avant-garde storyteller and playwright, Daniil Kharms, most likely didn’t regard this piece of his as a poem. Naturally, one of the main impulses for writing such a piece is to escape all labels. David Lehman, the editor of  Great American Prose Poems  (2003), even argues that some of the works he includes in the anthology may be both poetry and short fiction. Still, the question remains: what makes it poetry? Or more to the point, what made me believe that the fragments I found in my notebooks might indeed be poems?

The answer lies in the contradiction I have already alluded to. Prose poetry is a monster-child of two incompatible impulses, one which wants to tell a story and another, equally powerful, which wants to freeze an image, or a bit of language, for our scrutiny. In prose, sentence follows sentence till they have had their say. Poetry, on the other hand, spins in place. The moment we come to the end of a poem, we want to go back to the beginning and reread it, suspecting more there than meets the eye. Prose poems call on our powers to make imaginative connections between seemingly disconnected fragments of language, as anyone who has ever read one of these little-understood, always original and often unforgettable creations knows. They look like prose and act like poems, because, despite the odds, they make themselves into fly-traps for our imagination.

‘Blue Notebook Number 10’ was first published in Benedikt, M.  The Prose Poem: An International Anthology , Dell, New York, 1976.

And a bonus: a poem from Chard DeNiord, written on the occasion of Harvard Review’s publication of a feature issue on Mr. Simic in which Chard’s essay, “He Who Remembers His Shoes”, appeared. The poem also appears in his book Night Mowing in 2005, as well as in the  journal ForPoetry.

DINNER WITH CHARLIE

             I am moved like you, Mad Tom, by a line of ants;

             I behold their industry and they are giants.

Derek Walcott

We’re at the White Hotel. I pick up my fork straight out of hell and pin down my steak. Cut it with my knife. “Father confessor… Tongue all alone.” Charlie does the same with his duck.

We feed each other to practice for heaven. A red ant appears on the table in front of us. We watch him climb the dune of a napkin, traverse the desert of the table cloth.

“High yellow of my heart,” says Charlie, reciting Emile Roumer. “I had to search for him as a youth in New York. This ‘lowly’ Haitian who raised me up. This solitary ant on the table of America.”

The hawk-eyed waiter notices the ant from across the room and descends on him with a silent butler. “I apologize for this intrusion. There must be a nest somewhere that escaped our exterminator.” “We were rooting for him,” says Charlie, “to make it this once, like Lawrence of Arabia.”

A beautiful woman removes her coat and enters the room with an ugly man.

“You want dessert?” I ask. “I can’t decide between the creme brulé and chocolate mousse.”

Charlie is silent for a moment, staring into space through the shadow in his glasses. “I’ll have some more wine is all,” says Charlie. “The Cabernet Sauvignon.” There is a draft in the hall that blows through the room and stirs the hem of the beautiful woman.

The ant returns with a crumb on his shoulder and bruise on his head. We give him cover. Charlie shifts in his chair with a smile that’s clipped at the corners. “We’re on that ant,” he says. “He’s our Atlas bearing us into the world.”

Those interested can find biographical information on Charles Simic here

Chard deNiord is the poet laureate of Vermont and author of six books of poetry, most recently Interstate , (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).  deNiord is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Providence College, where he has taught since 1998, and a trustee of the Ruth Stone Trust. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife Liz.

Author: Charles Simic Simic Charles -->

Charles Simic , poet, essayist, and translator, was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. Since 1967, he has published twenty books of his own poetry, in addition to a memoir; the essay collection  The Life of Images ; and numerous books of translations for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. Simic is a frequent contributor to  The New York Review of Books  and in 2007 was chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He is emeritus professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973, and is distinguished visiting writer at New York University. The unpublished essay that appears in this issue of Plume was delivered as a talk on June 1, 2010 at The Poetry Festival in Rotterdam.

Reading and Writing Outside Thebes: In Praise of Syntax by Kimberly Johnson

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How to Write the AP Lit Prose Essay + Example

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What is the ap lit prose essay, how will ap scores affect my college chances.

AP Literature and Composition (AP Lit), not to be confused with AP English Language and Composition (AP Lang), teaches students how to develop the ability to critically read and analyze literary texts. These texts include poetry, prose, and drama. Analysis is an essential component of this course and critical for the educational development of all students when it comes to college preparation. In this course, you can expect to see an added difficulty of texts and concepts, similar to the material one would see in a college literature course.

While not as popular as AP Lang, over 380,136 students took the class in 2019. However, the course is significantly more challenging, with only 49.7% of students receiving a score of three or higher on the exam. A staggeringly low 6.2% of students received a five on the exam. 

The AP Lit exam is similar to the AP Lang exam in format, but covers different subject areas. The first section is multiple-choice questions based on five short passages. There are 55 questions to be answered in 1 hour. The passages will include at least two prose fiction passages and two poetry passages and will account for 45% of your total score. All possible answer choices can be found within the text, so you don’t need to come into the exam with prior knowledge of the passages to understand the work. 

The second section contains three free-response essays to be finished in under two hours. This section accounts for 55% of the final score and includes three essay questions: the poetry analysis essay, the prose analysis essay, and the thematic analysis essay. Typically, a five-paragraph format will suffice for this type of writing. These essays are scored holistically from one to six points.

Today we will take a look at the AP Lit prose essay and discuss tips and tricks to master this section of the exam. We will also provide an example of a well-written essay for review.  

The AP Lit prose essay is the second of the three essays included in the free-response section of the AP Lit exam, lasting around 40 minutes in total. A prose passage of approximately 500 to 700 words and a prompt will be given to guide your analytical essay. Worth about 18% of your total grade, the essay will be graded out of six points depending on the quality of your thesis (0-1 points), evidence and commentary (0-4 points), and sophistication (0-1 points). 

While this exam seems extremely overwhelming, considering there are a total of three free-response essays to complete, with proper time management and practiced skills, this essay is manageable and straightforward. In order to enhance the time management aspect of the test to the best of your ability, it is essential to understand the following six key concepts.

1. Have a Clear Understanding of the Prompt and the Passage

Since the prose essay is testing your ability to analyze literature and construct an evidence-based argument, the most important thing you can do is make sure you understand the passage. That being said, you only have about 40 minutes for the whole essay so you can’t spend too much time reading the passage. Allot yourself 5-7 minutes to read the prompt and the passage and then another 3-5 minutes to plan your response.

As you read through the prompt and text, highlight, circle, and markup anything that stands out to you. Specifically, try to find lines in the passage that could bolster your argument since you will need to include in-text citations from the passage in your essay. Even if you don’t know exactly what your argument might be, it’s still helpful to have a variety of quotes to use depending on what direction you take your essay, so take note of whatever strikes you as important. Taking the time to annotate as you read will save you a lot of time later on because you won’t need to reread the passage to find examples when you are in the middle of writing. 

Once you have a good grasp on the passage and a solid array of quotes to choose from, you should develop a rough outline of your essay. The prompt will provide 4-5 bullets that remind you of what to include in your essay, so you can use these to structure your outline. Start with a thesis, come up with 2-3 concrete claims to support your thesis, back up each claim with 1-2 pieces of evidence from the text, and write a brief explanation of how the evidence supports the claim.

2. Start with a Brief Introduction that Includes a Clear Thesis Statement

Having a strong thesis can help you stay focused and avoid tangents while writing. By deciding the relevant information you want to hit upon in your essay up front, you can prevent wasting precious time later on. Clear theses are also important for the reader because they direct their focus to your essential arguments. 

In other words, it’s important to make the introduction brief and compact so your thesis statement shines through. The introduction should include details from the passage, like the author and title, but don’t waste too much time with extraneous details. Get to the heart of your essay as quick as possible. 

3. Use Clear Examples to Support Your Argument 

One of the requirements AP Lit readers are looking for is your use of evidence. In order to satisfy this aspect of the rubric, you should make sure each body paragraph has at least 1-2 pieces of evidence, directly from the text, that relate to the claim that paragraph is making. Since the prose essay tests your ability to recognize and analyze literary elements and techniques, it’s often better to include smaller quotes. For example, when writing about the author’s use of imagery or diction you might pick out specific words and quote each word separately rather than quoting a large block of text. Smaller quotes clarify exactly what stood out to you so your reader can better understand what are you saying.

Including smaller quotes also allows you to include more evidence in your essay. Be careful though—having more quotes is not necessarily better! You will showcase your strength as a writer not by the number of quotes you manage to jam into a paragraph, but by the relevance of the quotes to your argument and explanation you provide.  If the details don’t connect, they are merely just strings of details.

4. Discussion is Crucial to Connect Your Evidence to Your Argument 

As the previous tip explained, citing phrases and words from the passage won’t get you anywhere if you don’t provide an explanation as to how your examples support the claim you are making. After each new piece of evidence is introduced, you should have a sentence or two that explains the significance of this quote to the piece as a whole.

This part of the paragraph is the “So what?” You’ve already stated the point you are trying to get across in the topic sentence and shared the examples from the text, so now show the reader why or how this quote demonstrates an effective use of a literary technique by the author. Sometimes students can get bogged down by the discussion and lose sight of the point they are trying to make. If this happens to you while writing, take a step back and ask yourself “Why did I include this quote? What does it contribute to the piece as a whole?” Write down your answer and you will be good to go. 

5. Write a Brief Conclusion

While the critical part of the essay is to provide a substantive, organized, and clear argument throughout the body paragraphs, a conclusion provides a satisfying ending to the essay and the last opportunity to drive home your argument. If you run out of time for a conclusion because of extra time spent in the preceding paragraphs, do not worry, as that is not fatal to your score. 

Without repeating your thesis statement word for word, find a way to return to the thesis statement by summing up your main points. This recap reinforces the arguments stated in the previous paragraphs, while all of the preceding paragraphs successfully proved the thesis statement.

6. Don’t Forget About Your Grammar

Though you will undoubtedly be pressed for time, it’s still important your essay is well-written with correct punctuating and spelling. Many students are able to write a strong thesis and include good evidence and commentary, but the final point on the rubric is for sophistication. This criteria is more holistic than the former ones which means you should have elevated thoughts and writing—no grammatical errors. While a lack of grammatical mistakes alone won’t earn you the sophistication point, it will leave the reader with a more favorable impression of you. 

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Here are Nine Must-have Tips and Tricks to Get a Good Score on the Prose Essay:

• Carefully read, review, and underline key instruction s in the prompt.
• Briefly outlin e what you want to cover in your essay.
• Be sure to have a clear thesis that includes the terms mentioned in the instructions, literary devices, tone, and meaning.
• Include the author’s name and title  in your introduction. Refer to characters by name.
• Quality over quantity when it comes to picking quotes! Better to have a smaller number of more detailed quotes than a large amount of vague ones.
• Fully explain how each piece of evidence supports your thesis .  
• Focus on the literary techniques in the passage and avoid summarizing the plot. 
• Use transitions to connect sentences and paragraphs.
• Keep your introduction and conclusion short, and don’t repeat your thesis verbatim in your conclusion.

Here is an example essay from 2020 that received a perfect 6:

[1] In this passage from a 1912 novel, the narrator wistfully details his childhood crush on a girl violinist. Through a motif of the allure of musical instruments, and abundant sensory details that summon a vivid image of the event of their meeting, the reader can infer that the narrator was utterly enraptured by his obsession in the moment, and upon later reflection cannot help but feel a combination of amusement and a resummoning of the moment’s passion. 

[2] The overwhelming abundance of hyper-specific sensory details reveals to the reader that meeting his crush must have been an intensely powerful experience to create such a vivid memory. The narrator can picture the “half-dim church”, can hear the “clear wail” of the girl’s violin, can see “her eyes almost closing”, can smell a “faint but distinct fragrance.” Clearly, this moment of discovery was very impactful on the boy, because even later he can remember the experience in minute detail. However, these details may also not be entirely faithful to the original experience; they all possess a somewhat mysterious quality that shows how the narrator may be employing hyperbole to accentuate the girl’s allure. The church is “half-dim”, the eyes “almost closing” – all the details are held within an ethereal state of halfway, which also serves to emphasize that this is all told through memory. The first paragraph also introduces the central conciet of music. The narrator was drawn to the “tones she called forth” from her violin and wanted desperately to play her “accompaniment.” This serves the double role of sensory imagery (with the added effect of music being a powerful aural image) and metaphor, as the accompaniment stands in for the narrator’s true desire to be coupled with his newfound crush. The musical juxtaposition between the “heaving tremor of the organ” and the “clear wail” of her violin serves to further accentuate how the narrator percieved the girl as above all other things, as high as an angel. Clearly, the memory of his meeting his crush is a powerful one that left an indelible impact on the narrator. 

[3] Upon reflecting on this memory and the period of obsession that followed, the narrator cannot help but feel amused at the lengths to which his younger self would go; this is communicated to the reader with some playful irony and bemused yet earnest tone. The narrator claims to have made his “first and last attempts at poetry” in devotion to his crush, and jokes that he did not know to be “ashamed” at the quality of his poetry. This playful tone pokes fun at his childhood self for being an inexperienced poet, yet also acknowledges the very real passion that the poetry stemmed from. The narrator goes on to mention his “successful” endeavor to conceal his crush from his friends and the girl; this holds an ironic tone because the narrator immediately admits that his attempts to hide it were ill-fated and all parties were very aware of his feelings. The narrator also recalls his younger self jumping to hyperbolic extremes when imagining what he would do if betrayed by his love, calling her a “heartless jade” to ironically play along with the memory. Despite all this irony, the narrator does also truly comprehend the depths of his past self’s infatuation and finds it moving. The narrator begins the second paragraph with a sentence that moves urgently, emphasizing the myriad ways the boy was obsessed. He also remarks, somewhat wistfully, that the experience of having this crush “moved [him] to a degree which now [he] can hardly think of as possible.” Clearly, upon reflection the narrator feels a combination of amusement at the silliness of his former self and wistful respect for the emotion that the crush stirred within him. 

[4] In this passage, the narrator has a multifaceted emotional response while remembering an experience that was very impactful on him. The meaning of the work is that when we look back on our memories (especially those of intense passion), added perspective can modify or augment how those experiences make us feel

More essay examples, score sheets, and commentaries can be found at College Board .

While AP Scores help to boost your weighted GPA, or give you the option to get college credit, AP Scores don’t have a strong effect on your admissions chances . However, colleges can still see your self-reported scores, so you might not want to automatically send scores to colleges if they are lower than a 3. That being said, admissions officers care far more about your grade in an AP class than your score on the exam.

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The Shape of the Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry

“Poetry leaves something out,” our columnist Elisa Gabbert says. But that’s hardly the extent of it.

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By Elisa Gabbert

I once heard a student say poetry is language that’s “coherent enough.” I love a definition this ambiguous. It’s both helpful (there’s a limit to coherence, and the limit is aesthetic) and unhelpful (enough for what, or whom?). It reminds me of a dictionary entry for “detritus” that I copied down in a notebook: “the pieces that are left when something breaks, falls apart, is destroyed, etc.” That seemed so artfully vague to me, so uncharacteristically casual for a dictionary. It has a quality of distraction, of trailing off, of suggesting you already know what detritus means. Part of me resists the question of what poetry is, or resists the answer — you already know what it means.

But let’s answer it anyway, starting with the obvious: If the words have rhyme and meter, it’s poetry. Nonwords with rhyme and meter, as in “Jabberwocky,” also are poetry. And since words in aggregate have at least some rhyme and rhythm, which lines on the page accentuate, any words composed in lines are poetry. There’s something to be said for the obvious. Virginia Woolf wrote of E.M. Forster: “He says the simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing one has overlooked.”

Is there much else? I think so. I think poetry leaves something out. All texts leave something out, of course — otherwise they’d be infinite — but most of the time, more is left out of a poem. Verse, by forcing more white space on the page, is constantly reminding you of what’s not there. This absence of something, this hyper-present absence, is why prose poems take up less space than other prose forms; the longer they get, the less they feel like poems. It’s why fragments are automatically poetic: Erasure turns prose into poems. It’s why any text that’s alluringly cryptic or elusive — a road sign, assembly instructions — is described as poetic. The poetic is not merely beauty in language, but beauty in incoherence, in resistance to common sense. The missingness of poetry slows readers down, making them search for what can’t be found. The encounter is almost inherently frustrating, as though one could not possibly pay enough attention. This is useful: Frustration is erotic.

“What is poetry?” is not the same question, quite, as “What is a poem?” How many poems did Emily Dickinson write? It depends what you count. In “Writing in Time,” the scholar Marta Werner writes, of Dickinson’s so-called Master letters, “At their most fundamental, ontological level, we don’t know what they are.” Perhaps my favorite poem of Dickinson’s is not, perhaps, a poem — it’s an odd bit of verse in the form of a letter to her sister-in-law, ending with the loveliest, slantest of rhymes: “Be Sue, while/I am Emily —/Be next, what/you have ever/been, Infinity.” Are the “breaks” really breaks? The letter is written on a small, narrow card; the words go almost to the edge of the paper. I think, too, of Rilke’s letters, which often read like poems. In 1925, he wrote to his Polish translator: “We are the bees of the Invisible. We wildly gather the honey of the visible, in order to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.” In these letter-poems, poetry reveals itself as more a mode of writing, a mode of thinking, even a mode of being , than a genre. The poem is not the only unit of poetry; poetic lines in isolation are still poetry. The poem is a vessel; poetry is liquid.

From time to time I’m asked, with bewilderment or derision, if this or that poem isn’t just “prose chopped into lines.” This idea of the free verse poem as “chopped” prose comes from Ezra Pound via Marjorie Perloff, who quotes Pound in her influential essay “The Linear Fallacy,” published in 1981. The essay encourages an oddly suspicious, even paranoid reading of most free verse as phony poetry, as prose in costume. The line, in Perloff’s view, in these ersatz poems, is a “surface device,” a “gimmick.” She removes all the breaks from a C.K. Williams poem to make the case that a stanza without the intentional carriage returns is merely a paragraph.

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The Difference Between Poetry and Prose

BY Martin Earl

Prose is all about accumulation (a morality of work), while poetry as it is practiced today is about the isolation of feelings (an aesthetics of omission).  Among other things, prose is principally an ethical project, while poetry is amoral, a tampering with truths which the world of prose (and its naturalistic approach to mimesis) takes for granted. Poetry creates its own truth, which at times is the same truth as the world’s, and sometimes not. Whatever the case, its mimesis is always a rearrangement, at a molecular level, of that axis between the “seen” and the “felt” (that coal chute which connects the childish eye to the Socratic heart), which, were it not for poetry, with its misguided elenchus, would remain obscured. In both classical and modern languages it is poetry that evolves first and is only much later followed by prose, as though in a language’s childhood, as in our own, poetry were the more efficient communicator of ideas. Whether this has to do with the nature of ideation or some characteristic intrinsic to the material evolution of tongues has never been adequately decided. Probably this evolution, from poetry to prose, depends on synergy—between the passion for thought and enthusiasm for new means. Technology also played a roll. With the spread of the printing press after 1440, texts no longer had to be memorized. Poetry’s inbuilt mnemonics (rhyme, meter, refrain, line breaks) were no longer essential for processing and holding on to knowledge. Little hard drives were suddenly everywhere available. But even a century later, in Elizabethan England, English prose had not yet come close to achieving the flexibility of poetry. One need only compare Shakespeare’s blank verse soliloquies to the abashed prose of one of the Elizabethans’ greatest disputants, Richard Hooker, or to the Martin Marprelate tracts. These are differences not only in talent but ones inherent to the medium. Even the King James Bible, “the noblest monument of English prose,” cannot compare to the blank verse of Shakespeare. New England, on the east coast of the New World, was settled before Old England would discover and colonize that vast intrinsic continent of prose, out of which the great syntactic nation states would evolve: Samuel Johnson, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens. This evolution would also signal poetry’s waning, as cultural energy discovered more viable substances for conduction. There would be no more Chaucers or Miltons, poets not only of elaborate prosodic, lexical and rhetorical resources but serious public relevance as well. Wordsworth’s Prelude is perhaps the last of the available epics, a form which begins, as far as our reckoning permits, with Homer. Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , has already tipped into prose. Emanuel Swedenborg, Blake’s model and goad (and a scientist by training), circumvented the limitations of 18 th century Swedish prose by composing his Arcana Cœlestia in Neo-Latin. Poetry’s last major flourishing during the first half of the 19 th century was a kind of Silver Age to what came before; it gave us a way to model our increasingly important private lives, as opposed to our public ones. This is its gift. Another Swedish writer, Tomas Tranströmer, last year’s Nobel, laureate, and the first poet to win the prize in sixteen years, when asked about his writing method, said that he doesn’t have one; he hinted at how close to evanescence our contemporary practice actually is: “…it’s hard to know what we really mean by writing for there’s a kind of inner writing that goes on all the time and it doesn’t need to finish up on paper…” *

* From a 1973 discussion with Gunnar Harding, translated by the Scottish poet Robin Fulton, Tranströmer’s most gifted English language translator.

Martin Earl lives in Coimbra, in central Portugal. From 1986 until 2001 he lectured in English, translation...

Few literary genres allow for experimentation quite as easily as prose poetry. Blending the techniques of prose with the emotion and lyricism of poetry , the best prose poems uncover subconscious thought with searing originality. Poets looking to break free from form, and prose writers seeking new means of expression, will absolutely find creative freedom in prose poetry.

So, what is a prose poem? What differentiates the genre from the lyric essay ? And why might you write prose poetry?

This article discusses the history of the form, with prose poetry examples and a discussion of how to write a prose poem. Let’s explore the features of prose poetry and the techniques of this experimental, expanding genre.

Prose Poetry Definition

Which of us, in his ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of consciousness? —Baudelaire, Paris Spleen , ix

What is a prose poem? It can be difficult to define, as the genre borrows heavily from different genres, and its definition changes within different periods of literary history. Additionally, many writers and critics have differing opinions about the form, making it harder to craft an objective prose poetry definition.

Our wonderful instructor, Barbara Henning , tackles these different prose poetry definitions in her recently published Prompt Book . Here’s an excerpt from her book that covers some different interpretations of prose poetry.

An excerpt from Prompt Book:

If you start searching around in literary dictionaries, you will find a variety of definitions, such as:

(1) Martin Gray writes, “Short work of POETIC PROSE, resembling a poem because of its ornate language and imagery , because it stands on its own, and lacks narrative: like a LYRIC poem but is not subjected to the patterning of METRE.”

(2) An entry in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry And Poetics: “A composition able to have any or all features of the lyric except that it is put on the page—though not conceived of—as prose. It differs from poetic prose in that it is short and compact, from free verse in that it has no line breaks , from a short prose passage in that it has, usually, more pronounced rhythm, sonorous effects, imagery, and density of expression. It may contain even inner rhyme and metral runs. Its length, generally, is from half a page (one or two paragraphs) to three or four pages, i.e., that of the average lyrical poem.

If it is any longer, the tensions and impact are forfeited, and it becomes—more or less poetic prose. The term “prose poem” has been applied irresponsibly to anything from the Bible to a novel by Faulkner, but should be used only to designate a highly conscious (sometimes even self-conscious) art form.” (John Simon)

(3) In one of the early prose poem anthologies, Michael Benedkt writes, “It is a genre of poetry, self consciously written in prose, and characterized by the intense use of virtually all the devices of poetry.. . . The sole exception . . . we would say, the line break.”

(4) A contemporary critic Stephen Fredman—who has written extensively about language poetry—calls it “poet’s prose.” He objects to the above definitions of the prose poem because they rely too heavily on Baudelaire’s description of a prose poem. The language poets were often critical of lyrical narrative-oriented poems. Fredman quotes David Antin:

“‘Prose’ is the name for a kind of notational style. It’s a way of making language look responsible. You’ve got justified margins, capital letters to begin graphemic strings which, when they are concluded by periods, are called sentences, indented sentences that mark off blocks of sentences that you call paragraphs. This notational apparatus is intended to add probity to that wildly irresponsible, occasionally illuminating and usually playful system called language.”

Novels may be written in ‘prose’; but in the beginning no books were written in prose, they were printed in prose, because ‘prose’ conveys an illusion of a common-sensical logical order.

Without writing, we had the sound of our words and poetic language to help us remember; then we had lines perhaps to help us hear the rhythm of our spoken voice. All aids to memory. Sentences and paragraphs are borders for organizing thoughts and pauses between thoughts.

I think of a prose poem as simply a poem written in sentences and paragraphs, rather than lines. It can be narrative . It can be dramatic. It can be lyrical . It can be scientific. It can be experimental. It can be so many things, but if the language and structure stand out, rather than the information, description, dialogue , plot, then I think of it as a poem. “Poetic prose” might be a little closer to language that explains or elaborates, unless it is fracturing and experimenting with the language of explanation. But, of course, this can be endlessly debated.

If you want to read a long thoughtful exploration on the definition of a prose poem, I suggest reading Michael Deville’s book, The American Prose Poem .

Summing Up: What is a Prose Poem?

In short, there’s no singular prose poetry definition, and many theorists disagree on the exact confines of the genres. However, most definitions agree on the following features of prose poetry:

Prose poetry is:

• Short—generally no longer than 4 pages, and sometimes only 1-3 brief paragraphs.
• Unconfined—prose poetry has no line breaks and is unaffected by the margins of the page.
• Sonic—a prose poem may rely on rhythm and internal rhyme, and often has a certain musicality (or, even, cacophony ).
• Concise—every word matters and builds tension.
• Experimental—the writer must rely completely on word choice , since prose poetry eschews the bounds of poetry forms and traditions.

To expand your understanding of the genre, check out Barbara’s course Poetic Prose: The Prose Poem .

Prose Poetry Examples

Let’s take a look at some prose poetry examples. The best prose poems incorporate the above features of prose poetry, and they also delve deeper into the speaker’s psyche, revealing powerful thoughts and feelings. Consider these 4 examples of prose poetry.

1. After the War by Heidi Howell

Originally published at Eastern Iowa Review .

After the War

• not remembering she thinks it. whenever there is a desire, a pause. she thinks it slowly blue, broken but not stars. (it can be more or less). something like a curve. or an after. she thinks it with or without the daughter. before or after the distance. a field and there isn’t any wind. finally, she has not seen it. she just stands and thinks it.
• the breath waits to happen. it pretends a separate movement. an open. a close. to refuse it is only wet feet. clothing. around the rain and after hold your hands up in the air. clasp it. asking. this always in the distance. and you not walking there.
• “i tell you not lingering what is the intimate. departing she has watched and stepped through. over them stumbling like the unexpected stick or fold. high. near. let fall. always a gap and she was believing its benevolence. holding that space and feeling it filled. everything happened. now. she will not deny or suspend.”

Let’s explore how “After the War” fits into our prose poetry definition.

• Short: The speaker explores the dissonance of thought in three brief paragraphs.
• Unconfined: There are no intentional line breaks or metrical patterns.
• Sonic: there are many examples of alliteration, such as “blue, broken but,” “believing its benevolence,” and “feeling it filled.” Additionally, the patterning of short and long sentences creates an evolving rhythm, like water gushing downstream.
• Concise: The sounds and sentence patterns build tension, while the writing explores the confines of a dangerous thought.
• Experimental: This prose poem explores a thought without ever speaking that thought. We feel the speaker’s emotions without needing to know exactly what’s on her mind. The writing also experiments with sentence structures, and it eschews the use of capital letters.

2. The Not Knowing is Most Intimate by Ilana Gustafson

Originally published in the writers.com Community Journal .

The Not Knowing is Most Intimate The dharma teacher’s wife is leaving him after forty-nine years of marriage. I think of him as you and I lay under the trees, away from the rest of the group. You ask me to identify birds. Acorn woodpecker. Rock pigeon. Red-tailed hawk. But you knew that one. My parents celebrate fifty years this month. I prefer the company of people who aren’t afraid to admit they don’t know a crow from a raven. Not knowing is most intimate. Not once has anyone at this party asked me what I do. I was prepared to answer honestly. “I hear animals calling through my body in the middle of the night,” and ponder how long they will keep talking to me. How long did his wife wish to leave? Oriole. They make these elaborate basket nests. I google a picture to show you. You drift off into the screen. Was it sudden? I am glad he is a Zen master. Preparation for this unfathomable fall into the intimate unknown. Life without his companion. That’s a raven, not a crow. The ground, a grassy little teeter-totter.

Let’s explore how “The Not Knowing is Most Intimate” fits into our prose poetry definition.

• Short: Multiple ideas are presented in one paragraph, exploring the intimacy and humanness of simply not knowing.
• Sonic: This prose poem alternates between short and long sentences. Additionally, it alternates between declarative sentences, questions, and dialogue, keeping the pace fresh and interesting.
• Concise: These three narratives could easily take up pages and pages of narrative. Instead, they’ve been condensed in a way that the reader can make connections and glean insight, without having that insight stated explicitly.
• Experimental: This prose poem uses a narrative technique called braiding , interweaving multiple storylines into a single cogent story. It is common for prose poetry to borrow techniques from other genres.

3. Be Drunk by Charles Baudelaire

Reproduced from Poets.org . Baudelaire was one of the first Western writers to embrace the prose poetry form.

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

Let’s explore how “Be Drunk” fits into our prose poetry definition.

• Short: This prose poem is written in three brief paragraphs.
• Sonic: There are some great examples of alliteration, such as “burden of time that breaks your back and bends you,” as well as “drunkenness already diminishing.”
• Concise: Baudelaire captures a philosophy of life in three simple paragraphs. It’s not about alcoholism or chemical intoxication: it’s about being inebriated with life itself, much like all of nature seems to be.
• Experimental: The last paragraph is built with a single sentence, which emulates the intensity and ecstasy of life itself. Additionally, Baudelaire was highly experimental for his time, as most poetry still conformed to the strictness of meter and rhyme schemes.

4. Stinging, or Conversation with a Pin by Stephanie Trenchard

Originally published in the Writers.com Community Journal .

Stinging, or Conversation with a Pin

Stinging me—that pin. Caressing you—this curve. Imagine me that night forgetting you this morning. Lulling me, an oversight, goodnight. Alarming you under dark, rough morning. Reminding me of pain, forgetting you for pleasure. Shaming me for denying. Accepting you not believing. Always in a rush, never out of time. Lazy busy me. Enterprising deliberate you. Let it lay, a pin in the plush. Pick it up, this orb of concrete. Sleepy, pin pokes as pins do. Awake, orb rolls unlike orbs. Sharp unknown in the rug, smooth known under a bed, a thing that hurts remains untouched

Let’s explore how “Stinging, or Conversation with a Pin” fits into our prose poetry definition.

• Short: This prose poem is only a paragraph in length.
• Sonic: There’s a lot of internal rhyme in this piece, with consecutive “ing,” “ight,” and “zee” sounds.
• Concise: In one paragraph, this prose poem establishes a dialogue between the pin and the curve, with each symbolizing one side of a dysfunctional relationship.
• Experimental: Like other prose poetry examples, this piece relies on specific poetry techniques—namely, juxtaposition and symbolism . Yet this piece is also structured like dialogue, which is more common in prose. By putting the pin and the curve in conversation and letting each item represent one half of a doomed relationship, the speaker traces the psyche of someone whose love won’t let them thrive.

Where to Find and Submit Prose Poetry Online

A handful of literary journals routinely publish prose poems. If you’re looking for more prose poetry examples, or if you’d like to publish a prose poem yourself, check out these journals:

• Beloit Poetry Journal
• Ninth Letter
• Unbroken Journal
• Baltimore Review
• Pithead Chapel

How to Write a Prose Poem: Tips and Strategies

In many ways, the act of writing prose poetry is freeing. Rather than deliberating over line breaks, rhyme schemes, or “sounding poetic,” the prose poet merely needs to write prose, poetically.

Nonetheless, there are a few strategies you can use to write polished, emotive prose poetry. Here’s 5 tips on how to write a prose poem.

1. Write Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness is a writing technique in which the writer’s thoughts flow unfiltered onto the page. It’s a tough technique to master: the writer has to focus on setting each thought on the page, without editing or omitting anything. This practice, also known as “First Thought, Best Thought,” is a facet of the Mindfulness Writing Method .

Writing stream of consciousness allows the writer to reveal crucial aspects of their psyche. Refer back to John Simon’s prose poetry definition, which argues that the genre is “a highly conscious (even self-conscious) art form.” Stream of consciousness requires practice and research, but with mastery, you can easily identify threads of thought that lend themselves to prose poems.

2. Use Poetic Devices

Although prose poetry doesn’t use meter or rhyme schemes, it does rely heavily on poetic devices . Sound devices (like alliteration, consonance, euphony, internal rhyme) and literary devices (like metaphor, symbolism, juxtaposition, anaphora) help create the experience of the prose poem, both sonic and emotive.

Just like stream of consciousness, the use of poetic devices takes time to master. However, many poetic devices emerge on their own accord, without intervention from the writer. Many images can be imbued with symbolic meaning simply by existing, and you might also benefit from starting with a writing prompt.

Simply put: use concrete images, play with sound, and write honestly. You might be surprised by the deeper meaning that emerges.

3. Play With Punctuation and Sentence Structure

In addition to sound devices, punctuation and sentence structure can improve the experience of the prose poem.

Punctuation greatly affects readability. If your sentences contain mostly commas and periods, they’ll be read as complete, authoritative thoughts. Sentences that contain colons and semicolons might: meander; flit between different thoughts and ideas; create moving, long-winded experiences; or even combine multiple ideas into one long, comprehensive sentence. Finally, the use of em-dashes—like in “With a Bang” by Barbara Henning —can highlight the poem’s stream of consciousness—moving in and out of thoughts like bees flitting through flowers.

Sentence structure also affects readability. Short sentences are crisp. They demonstrate authority and simplicity. Long sentences, on the other hand, can wander all over the page, creating vivid soundscapes and haunting juxtapositions—as well as hard-to-follow ideas or intricately constructed emotions.

Both prose writers and poets must pay attention to punctuation and sentence structure. However, these elements are especially important to prose poetry, as they seek to emulate the writer’s own thoughts and feelings. The elements of grammar aren’t just mechanical, they’re essential to creating the prose poetry experience.

4. Focus on Musicality

What happens when you make your prose sing? Because the prose poem defies conventional forms and structures, it can also defy conventional meanings and logics. The daring prose poet might try to write towards something sonorous, imbuing their work with musicality before editing for clarity.

What does this mean? It means letting the words take you where they want to go. It means musical sentences. Words with rhythm and cadence. Language that prioritizes sound over meaning; language that makes meaning  through sound .

In other words, try writing a prose poem using words that you love just because you love them. You can always edit to make the prose poem make sense later. For writing, just play with language. Use words as your sandbox. If you love the sound of words like “zephyrous” and “susurration,” or if you love onomatopoeias like “kaboom” and “clackety-clack,” use them even if they don’t make perfect sense. Prose poets love the sounds of words, and a good prose poem can create an experience solely out of sound.

5. Edit for Clarity

You might find that, after reading your stream of consciousness, your writing doesn’t make much sense. Sometimes, this is perfectly fine—prose poetry is often about creating a literary experience, evoking emotions without obvious logic.

At the same time, if the writing feels too obscure or incomprehensible, it’s worth editing for clarity and omitting needless words .

To be clear: your edits should focus mostly on clarity. You can clean up your sentences, add some sonic devices, and alter punctuation.

However, you shouldn’t focus on adding more words or changing the poem’s meaning. Such interference can make the work more confusing and obscure. The best prose poems act as mirrors of the heart; over-editing merely streaks the glass.

The best prose poems act as mirrors of the heart; over-editing merely streaks the glass.

Learn How to Write a Prose Poem in our Prose Poetry Course!

Looking for more prose poetry examples and tips? Barbara Henning’s course Poetic Prose: The Prose Poem helps writers experiment their way through prose poetry.

The prompts in Barbara’s class direct the student to look at their spoken and inner language as ever available material from which to make art. The assignments, backgrounds and prose poetry examples offered provide an introduction to the prose poem and to some of the poetic movements in modern and contemporary off-center poetry, such as imagism, surrealism, objectivism, the New York School, Language writing, etc. The prompts are designed to expand a poet’s sense of voice and form, offering new constraints and approaches. If you are a prose writer, the assignments may help you work on sentence style and narrative structures.

Learn the form’s history and techniques, and create moving works of poetic prose with Barbara’s prompts and assignments. You can also gain extra feedback on your work through our Facebook group . We hope to see you there!

Sean Glatch

I would love to take your class, but the tie is conflicting with a classIm taking now. Please let me know when you will give this class again

Hi Svetlana, thanks for your message! If the November 10th session of Poetic Prose doesn’t work for you, the next session will be offered on March 9th, 2022. Feel free to email [email protected] with any questions about this. Much appreciated!

I thoroughly enjoyed this detailed review of prose poetry. Thank you for sharing!

Thank you for the explanation, This is truly mysterious. The form makes more sense now.

Wow! This was very enlightening and super fun.. Thank you, so much for such a well detailed article. It’s as poetic as the topic discussed.

[…] Today’s prompt from NaPoWriMo asks for a surreal prose poem. For reference, this link features the confines of what is a prose poem. […]

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11 Literature (including fiction, drama, poetry, and prose)

Essential Questions for Literature

• How is literature like life?
• What is literature supposed to do?
• What influences a writer to create?
• How does literature reveal the values of a given culture or time period?
• How does the study of fiction and nonfiction texts help individuals construct their understanding of reality?
• In what ways are all narratives influenced by bias and perspective?
• Where does the meaning of a text reside? Within the text, within the reader, or in the transaction that occurs between them?
• What can a reader know about an author’s intentions based only on a reading of the text?
• What are enduring questions and conflicts that writers (and their cultures) grappled with hundreds of years ago and are still relevant today?
• How do we gauge the optimism or pessimism of a particular time period or particular group of writers?
• Why are there universal themes in literature–that is, themes that are of interest or concern to all cultures and societies?
• What are the characteristics or elements that cause a piece of literature to endure?
• What is the purpose of: science fiction? satire? historical novels, etc.?
• How do novels, short stories, poetry, etc. relate to the larger questions of philosophy and humanity?
• How we can use literature to explain or clarify our own ideas about the world?
• How does what we know about the world shape the stories we tell?
• How do the stories we tell about the world shape the way we view ourselves?
• How do our personal experiences shape our view of others?
• What does it mean to be an insider or an outsider?
• Are there universal themes in literature that are of interest or concern to all cultures and societies?
• What is creativity and what is its importance for the individual / the culture?
• What are the limits, if any, of freedom of speech?

Defining Literature

Literature, in its broadest sense, is any written work. Etymologically, the term derives from Latin  litaritura / litteratura  “writing formed with letters,” although some definitions include spoken or sung texts. More restrictively, it is writing that possesses literary merit. Literature can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction and whether it is poetry or prose. It can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short story or drama, and works are often categorized according to historical periods or their adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations (genre).

Taken to mean only written works, literature was first produced by some of the world’s earliest civilizations—those of Ancient Egypt and Sumeria—as early as the 4th millennium BC; taken to include spoken or sung texts, it originated even earlier, and some of the first written works may have been based on a pre-existing oral tradition. As urban cultures and societies developed, there was a proliferation in the forms of literature. Developments in print technology allowed for literature to be distributed and experienced on an unprecedented scale, which has culminated in the twenty-first century in electronic literature.

Definitions of literature have varied over time.  In Western Europe prior to the eighteenth century, literature as a term indicated all books and writing. [1]   A more restricted sense of the term emerged during the Romantic period, in which it began to demarcate “imaginative” literature. [2]

 Contemporary debates over what constitutes literature can be seen as returning to the older, more inclusive notion of what constitutes literature. Cultural studies, for instance, takes as its subject of analysis both popular and minority genres, in addition to canonical works. [3]

Major Forms

A calligram by Guillaume Apollinaire. These are a type of poem in which the written words are arranged in such a way to produce a visual image.

Poetry is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, prosaic ostensible meaning (ordinary intended meaning). Poetry has traditionally been distinguished from prose by its being set in verse; [4]  prose is cast in sentences, poetry in lines; the syntax of prose is dictated by meaning, whereas that of poetry is held across metre or the visual aspects of the poem. [5]

Prior to the nineteenth century, poetry was commonly understood to be something set in metrical lines; accordingly, in 1658 a definition of poetry is “any kind of subject consisting of Rythm or Verses”. [6]  Possibly as a result of Aristotle’s influence (his  Poetics ), “poetry” before the nineteenth century was usually less a technical designation for verse than a normative category of fictive or rhetorical art. [7]  As a form it may pre-date literacy, with the earliest works being composed within and sustained by an oral tradition; [8]  hence it constitutes the earliest example of literature.

Prose is a form of language that possesses ordinary syntax and natural speech rather than rhythmic structure; in which regard, along with its measurement in sentences rather than lines, it differs from poetry. [9]  On the historical development of prose, Richard Graff notes that ”

Novel : a long fictional prose narrative.

Novella :The novella exists between the novel and short story; the publisher Melville House classifies it as “too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story.” [10]

Short story : a dilemma in defining the “short story” as a literary form is how to, or whether one should, distinguish it from any short narrative. Apart from its distinct size, various theorists have suggested that the short story has a characteristic subject matter or structure; [11]   these discussions often position the form in some relation to the novel. [12]

Drama is literature intended for performance. [13]

Leitch  et al. ,  The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism , 28  ↵

Ross, “The Emergence of “Literature”: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century,” 406 & Eagleton,  Literary theory: an introduction , 16  ↵

“POETRY, N.”.  OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY . OUP. RETRIEVED 13 FEBRUARY 2014. (subscription required)  ↵

Preminger,  The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics , 938–9  ↵

Ross, “The Emergence of “Literature”: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century”, 398  ↵

FINNEGAN, RUTH H. (1977). ORAL POETRY: ITS NATURE, SIGNIFICANCE, AND SOCIAL CONTEXT. INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS. P. 66. & MAGOUN, JR., FRANCIS P. (1953). “ORAL-FORMULAIC CHARACTER OF ANGLO-SAXON NARRATIVE POETRY”.SPECULUM 28 (3): 446–67. DOI:10.2307/2847021  ↵

Preminger,  The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics , 938–9 &Alison Booth; Kelly J. Mays. “Glossary: P”. LitWeb , the Norton Introduction to Literature Studyspace . Retrieved 15 February 2014.   ↵

Antrim, Taylor (2010). “In Praise of Short”. The Daily Beast. Retrieved 15 February 2014.  ↵

ROHRBERGER, MARY; DAN E. BURNS (1982). “SHORT FICTION AND THE NUMINOUS REALM: ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT DEFINITION”.  MODERN FICTION STUDIES . XXVIII (6). & MAY, CHARLES (1995).  THE SHORT STORY. THE REALITY OF ARTIFICE . NEW YORK: TWAIN.  ↵

Marie Louise Pratt (1994). Charles May, ed.  The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It . Athens: Ohio UP.  ↵

Elam, Kier (1980).  The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama . London and New York: Methuen. p. 98.ISBN 0-416-72060-9.  ↵

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Literature. Provided by: Wikipedia. Located at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature#cite_note-44 . License:  CC BY-SA: Attribution- ShareAlike

PUBLIC DOMAIN CONTENT: Image of man formed by words. Authored by: Guillaume Apollinaire. Located at:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calligramme.jpg . License:  Public Domain: No Known Copyright

Listen to this Discussion of the poetry of Harris Khalique . You might want to take a look at the transcript as you listen.

The first half of a 2008 reading featuring four Latino poets, as part of the American Perspectives series at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Listen to poetry reading of Francisco Aragón and Brenda Cárdenas

Listen to this conversation with Allison Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan and Sherwin Bitsui . You might want to look at the transcript as you listen. In this program, we hear a conversation among three Native American poets: Allison Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan and Sherwin Bitsui. Allison Hedge Coke grew up listening to her Father’s traditional stories as she moved from Texas to North Carolina to Canada and the Great Plains. She is the author of several collections of poetry and the memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. She has worked as a mentor with Native Americans and at-risk youth, and is currently a Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. Linda Hogan is a prolific poet, novelist and essayist. Her work is imbued with an indigenous sense of history and place, while it explores environmental, feminist and spiritual themes. A former professor at the University of Colorado, she is currently the Chickasaw Nation’s Writer in Residence. She lives in Oklahoma, where she researches and writes about Chickasaw history, mythology and ways of life. Sherwin Bitsui grew up on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. He speaks Dine, the Navajo language and participates in ceremonial activities. His poetry has a sense of the surreal, combining images of the contemporary urban culture, with Native ritual and myth.

Remember to return to the essential questions. Can expand on any of your answers to these questions? You might want to research these poets.

Chris Abani : Stories from Africa

In this deeply personal talk, Nigerian writer Chris Abani says that “what we know about how to be who we are” comes from stories. He searches for the heart of Africa through its poems and narrative, including his own.

Listen to Isabel Allende’s Ted Talk

As a novelist and memoirist, Isabel Allende writes of passionate lives, including her own. Born into a Chilean family with political ties, she went into exile in the United States in the 1970s—an event that, she believes, created her as a writer. Her voice blends sweeping narrative with touches of magical realism; her stories are romantic, in the very best sense of the word. Her novels include The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna, and her latest, Maya’s Notebook and Ripper. And don’t forget her adventure trilogy for young readers— City of the Beasts, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon and Forest of the Pygmies.

As a memoirist, she has written about her vision of her lost Chile, in My Invented Country, and movingly tells the story of her life to her own daughter, in Paula. Her book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses memorably linked two sections of the bookstore that don’t see much crossover: Erotica and Cookbooks. Just as vital is her community work: The Isabel Allende Foundation works with nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chile to empower and protect women and girls—understanding that empowering women is the only true route to social and economic justice.

You can read excerpts of her books online here: https://www.isabelallende.com/en/books

Read her musings. Why does she write? https://www.isabelallende.com/en/musings

You might choose to read one of her novels.

Listen to Novelist Chimamanda Adichie . She speaks about how our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. She tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

One Hundred Years of Solitu de

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” brought Latin American literature to the forefront of the global imagination and earned García Márquez the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. What makes the novel so remarkable? Francisco Díez-Buzo investigates.

Answer these questions as you listen:

How many generations of the Buendía family are in One Hundred Years of Solitude?

In what year did Gabriel García Marquez start writing One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Who inspired the style of One Hundred Years of Solitude?

A Colonel Aureliano Buendía

B Gabriel García Márquez

C Nicolás Ricardo Márquez

D Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes

Which real-life event is almost directly represented in the novel?

A The Banana Massacre of 1928

B The Venezuelan coup d’état of 1958

C The Thousand Days’ War

D The bogotazo

What is the name of the town where the novel is set?

A Aracataca

Please explain how One Hundred Years of Solitude exemplifies the genre of magical realism.

What were the key influences in García Márquez’s life that helped inspire One Hundred Years of Solitude?

The narrative moves in a particular shape. What is that shape? How is that shape created?

Gabriel García Márquez was a writer and journalist who recorded the haphazard political history of Latin American life through his fiction. He was a part of a literary movement called the  Latin American “boom ,” which included writers like Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, Argentina’s Julio Cortázar, and Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes. Almost all of these writers  incorporated aspects of magical realism in their work . Later authors, such as Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie, would carry on and adapt the genre to the cultural and historical experiences of other countries and continents. García Máruqez hadn’t always planned on being a writer, but a pivotal moment in Colombia’s—and Latin America’s—history changed all that. In 1948, when García Márquez was a law student in Bogotá,  Jorge Eliécer Gaítan , a prominent radical populist leader of Colombia’s Liberal Party, was assassinated. This happened while the U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall brought together leaders from across the Americas to create the  Organization of American States  (OAS) and to build a hemisphere-wide effort against communism. In the days after the assassination, massive riots, now called the  bogotazo , occurred. The worst Colombian civil war to date, known as  La Violencia ,  also broke out. Another law student, visiting from Cuba, was deeply affected by Eliécer Gaítan’s death. This student’s name was Fidel Castro. Interestingly, García Márquez and Castro—both socialists—would  become close friends later on in life , despite not meeting during these tumultuous events. One Hundred Years of Solitude ’s success almost didn’t happen, but this  article  from  Vanity Fair  helps explain how a long-simmering idea became an international sensation. When Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in 1982, he gave a  lecture  that helped illuminate the plights that many Latin Americans faced on a daily basis. Since then, that lecture has also helped explain the political and social critiques deeply embedded in his novels. It was famous for being an indigenous overview of how political violence became entrenched in Latin America during the Cold War.In an  interview  with the  New Left Review , he discussed a lot of the inspirations for his work, as well as his political beliefs.

Don Quixote

Mounting his skinny steed, Don Quixote charges an army of giants. It is his duty to vanquish these behemoths in the name of his beloved lady, Dulcinea. There’s only one problem: the giants are merely windmills. What is it about this tale of the clumsy yet valiant knight that makes it so beloved? Ilan Stavans investigates.

Why do Don Quixote and Sancho Panza work well together?

A They eat at strange times of the day

B They are impatient

C They like to dance together

D Their characters complement each other

Why does Don Quixote want to fix the world?

A He is a knight who believes in social justice

B He reads many books

C He doesn’t have any friends

D He loves toys

Why is Don Quixote’s love for Dulcinea described as “platonic”?

A Plato is their matchmaker

B They love Greek philosophy

C They want material fortune

D It’s purely spiritual

Why is Cervantes’s book described as “the first modern novel”?

A It was originally adapted to television

B The characters evolve throughout the story

C Cervantes only wrote poetry before

D It refers to technological advances

What does the term “quixotic” mean?

B A person without money

C An old man

D A dreamer

In what ways do Don Quixote and Sancho Panza change as the plot progresses?

Is it possible to count the total number of days that pass during their journey?

In what ways does their journey reveal the changes that 17th-century Spain is also undergoing?

Interested in exploring the world of  Don Quixote ? Check out  this translation  of the thrill-seeking classic. To learn more about  Don Quixote ’s rich cultural history, click  here . In  this interview , the educator shares his inspiration behind his book  Quixote: The Novel and the World . The travails of  Don Quixote ’s protagonist were heavily shaped by real-world events in 17th-century Spain. This  article  provides detailed research on what, exactly, happened during that time.

Midnight’s Children

It begins with a countdown. A woman goes into labor as the clock ticks towards midnight. Across India, people wait for the declaration of independence after nearly 200 years of British rule. At the stroke of midnight, an infant and two new nations are born in perfect synchronicity. These events form the foundation of “Midnight’s Children.” Iseult Gillespie explores Salman Rushdie’s dazzling novel.

Saleem Sinai’s birth coincides with:

A The invasion of India by the British

B The end of British occupation and the creation of two new nations, India and Pakistan

C The death of his mother

D His discovery of magic powers

Midnight’s Children is set over the course of:

A About thirty years of Saleem’s life

B A single day in Saleem’s life

C The duration of British occupation

D About thirty years of Saleem’s life, as well as flashbacks to before he was born

Saleem is the only person in the book with magic powers

Saleem has powers of

A Telepathy

B Shape shifting

C Predicting the future

Midnight’s Children is full of cultural references, including

A 1001 Nights

D Mythology

E All of the above

List some of the historical events that are part of the plot of Midnight’s Children

Why is Midnight’s Children a work of postcolonial literature? Describe some of the features of postcolonial literature.

In addition to being a work of postcolonial literature, Midnight’s Children is considered a key work of magical realism. Why do you think this is? What are some of the features of the book that could classify as magical realism?

Midnight’s Children filters epic and complex histories through one man’s life. What are the benefits of fictionalizing history in this way? What do you think he is trying to tell us about the way we process our past? Can history be as much of a narrative construct as fiction?

At the stroke of midnight, the first gasp of a newborn syncs with the birth of two new nations. These simultaneous events are at the center of Midnight’s Children, a dazzling novel about the state of modern India by the British-Indian author  Salman Rushdie . You can listen to an interview with Rushdie discussing the novel  here . The chosen baby is Saleem Sinai, who narrates the novel from a pickle factory in 1977. As  this article  argues, much of the beauty of the narrative lies in Rushdie’s ability to weave the personal into the political in surprising ways. Saleem’s narrative leaps back in time, to trace his family history from 1915 on. The family tree is blossoming with bizarre scenes, including clandestine courtships, babies swapped at birth, and cryptic prophecies. For a detailed interactive timeline of the historical and personal events threaded through the novel,  click here . However, there’s one trait that can’t be explained by genes alone – Saleem has magic powers, and they’re somehow related to the time of his birth. For an overview of the use of magical realism and astonishing powers in Mignight’s Children,  click here. Saleem recounts a new nation, flourishing and founding after almost a century of British rule. For more information on the dark history of British occupation of India,  visit this page. The vast historical frame is one reason why Midnight’s Children is considered one of the most illuminating works of  postcolonial literature  ever written. This genre typically addresses life in formerly colonized countries, and explores the fallout through themes like revolution, migration, and identity. Postcolonial literature also deals with the search for agency and authenticity in the wake of imposed foreign rule. Midnight’s Children reflects these concerns with its explosive combination of Eastern and Western references. On the one hand, it’s been compared to the sprawling novels of Charles Dickens or George Elliot, which also offer a panoramic vision of society paired with tales of personal development. But Rushdie radically disrupts this formula by adding Indian cultural references, magic and myth. Saleem writes the story by night, and narrates it back to his love interest, Padma. This echoes the frame for  1001 Nights , a collection of Middle Eastern folktales told by Scheherazade every night to her lover – and as Saleem reminds us, 1001 is “the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities.” Saleem spends a lot of the novel attempting to account for the unexpected. But he often gets thoroughly distracted and goes on astonishing tangents, telling dirty jokes or mocking his enemies. With his own powers of telepathy, Saleem forges connections between other children of midnight; including a boy who can step through time and mirrors, and a child who changes their gender when immersed in water. There’s other flashes of magic throughout, from a mother who can see into dreams to witchdoctors, shapeshifters, and many more. For an overview of the dazzling reference points of the novel,  visit this page . Sometimes, all this is like reading a rollercoaster: Saleem sometimes narrates separate events all at once, refers to himself in the first and third person in the space of a single sentence, or uses different names for one person. And Padma is always interrupting, urging him to get to the point or exclaiming at his story’s twists and turns. This mind-bending approach has garnered continuing fascination and praise. Not only did Midnight’s Children win the prestigious Man Booker prize in its year of publication,  but it was named the best of all the winners in 2008 . For an interview about Rushdie’s outlook and processed,  click here. All this gives the narrative a breathless quality, and brings to life an entire society surging through political upheaval without losing sight of the marvels of individual lives. But even as he depicts the cosmological consequences of a single life, Rushdie questions the idea that we can ever condense history into a single narrative.

Tom Elemas : The Inspiring Truth in Fiction

What do we lose by choosing non-fiction over fiction? For Tomas Elemans, there’s an important side effect of reading fiction: empathy — a possible antidote to a desensitized world filled with tragic news and headlines.

What is empathy? How does story-telling create empathy? What stories trigger empathy in you? What is narrative immersion? Are we experiencing an age of narcissism? What might be some examples of narcissism? What connection does Tom Elemans make to individualism?

Ann Morgan: My year reading a book from every country in the world

Ann Morgan considered herself well read — until she discovered the “massive blindspot” on her bookshelf. Amid a multitude of English and American authors, there were very few books from beyond the English-speaking world. So she set an ambitious goal: to read one book from every country in the world over the course of a year. Now she’s urging other Anglophiles to read translated works so that publishers will work harder to bring foreign literary gems back to their shores. Explore interactive maps of her reading journey here: go.ted.com/readtheworld

Her blog: Check out my blog (http://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/), where you can find a complete list of the books I read, and what I learned along the way.

Jacqueline Woodson: What reading slowly taught me about writing

Reading slowly — with her finger running beneath the words, even when she was taught not to — has led Jacqueline Woodson to a life of writing books to be savored. In a lyrical talk, she invites us to slow down and appreciate stories that take us places we never thought we’d go and introduce us to people we never thought we’d meet. “Isn’t that what this is all about — finding a way, at the end of the day, to not feel alone in this world, and a way to feel like we’ve changed it before we leave?” she asks.

Introduction to Humanities II Copyright © by loribethlarsenclcmnedu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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On the Many Ways and Reasons to Mix Poetry and Prose

Contributing to a long-standing and very various tradition.

All I often knew was that I did not only want to write poems. This was a theme through my adolescence (I was an early writer, in some ways) and then later. A bizarre depression settled over the already strange young person that I was, for I had inherited a world that stringently divided prose from verse, that swore to the usefulness of prose and the mere tolerability—bemoaning a noxious lack of good, clear purpose—of poetry, as pop songs played in the background. And on this point I have mostly remained despondent. I have never wanted only to write poems or, for that matter, to write only prose.

But as luck and the lucky fact that it is nearly impossible for a human being to have an entirely unique desire would have it, I was not alone in my wish for literary combination. Though this form, practice, or, as it may be, genre is seldom taught in school (I have been to many), there exists a long-standing and various tradition of bringing together poems and prose into synthetic items of literature. In the classical West sometimes this is called prosimetrum . Elsewhere, I have liked terms like “miscellany,” “saga,” “postmodern novel.” There are, it turns out, not just many ways, but many reasons to write a work bringing together groups of sentences with groups of words that are measured out according to principles and patterns that are not merely grammatical. If your eyes can withstand another 1,500 words, you may gather what are, in my opinion, a few of the better reasons for engaging in this sort of mixture.

REASON ONE: you recognize that much distinction is arbitrary.  I do not know if prose is the opposite of verse. This is like asking what the opposite of a cat is. Some may know that verse and prose have long had the strange if plausible function of designating, in writing, the difference between song and “plain” speech. It’s on these grounds, anyway, that much of the much-touted, as well as the much-debated, specialness of poetry, particularly lyric poetry, is, as far as I have been able to ascertain, based.

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Let us jump to the 17th century in France. A character in Molière’s Bourgeois gentilhomme remarks (I paraphrase), “Very cool. I had no idea I’d been speaking prose my whole life.” Such limp delight at learning that one is already playing by timeworn rules suggests a rhyme between canonicity and complacency, of course, but could also hint at the radical irrelevance of the very category of prose—or, for that matter, speech. It is surely easier to maintain interest in these matters when writing has not lain down and died in the pit suggested by the verse-prose distinction. The German Romantics’—to jump again—idea of prose was pleasantly nonstandard. If aphoristic, it was endlessly so, like a staircase in a dream. Their poems were likewise dreamy; sometimes fragmentary, disordered. Their novels included folk songs and other lyric professions, suggesting that there was something particularly worthy about the combination of lineated language with the paragraph, the breaking of prose. The poet Novalis wrote about the sentence as a temporary “containment” of linguistic dynamism, maintaining that “A time will come when it no longer exists.” And Friedrich Schlegel, in his “Letter on the Novel,” composed at the dawning of the new (19th) century, insisted on a lapidary lineage of mixed genre dating back to the late middle ages: “I can hardly imagine a novel otherwise than as a mixture of narrative, song, and other forms. Cervantes never composed otherwise, and even Boccaccio, in other respects so prosaic, decorated his collection with inset songs.”

It seems, too, that within the apparently mongrel and/or pastiche environment of novels including songs, which is to say, songs surrounded by narrative prose, poets might act not only as convenient speakers or singers but also as more or less curious characters, bringing me to my second rationale, aka, REASON TWO : it is conceivable to you that the poet is as likely to be a character or other figment, as a genuine, living person . For Anglophone readers, the inevitable point of comparison is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire , of 1962. And, as this novel points up, when the poet, here one John Shade, becomes a character, we find a literalized depiction of those aspects of personality and personal history that in America the professional critic was tasked with discovering and/or vivisecting on behalf of the lay reader. Whether or not Nabokov was aggressively satirizing New Critical leanings in American letters, Pale Fire , like Novalis’s The Novices of Sais , places a poet in a landscape, which is at once the prose of the book and a more-or-less everyday world. In this sense the novelist might be acting as a sort of historian, folklorist, or cultural critic; the song or poem does not appear free of charge but rather demands context, which is often a close cousin of interpretation. It hardly need be said that in the novel the poem can be deployed in an endless number of ways, ranging from artifact to spell.

Yet, the paradigmatic examples of books of poems combined with plot have to be a pair of works written by contemporaries in 11th-century Japan, The Pillowbook by Sei Shōnagon and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. In these two books, the first a diary, the second a novel, numerous characters within court society compose poetry. This is at once a pastime and a kind of networked system of communication and signification, permitting simultaneous epistolary address and reference back to the system, to its histories and commonplaces. Through the poems interspersed in The Pillowbook and The Tale of Genji we learn not merely the emotions and motivations of characters, but also how they deal with the problem of writing and how they deploy it, whether as lure, dissimulation, entreaty, or gift outright. For writing is not only unnatural, it is also and of course a means of obtaining and manipulating power. And the ambiguity of the poem permits kinds of meaning prose’s obviousness precludes. A description of a flower may be just that, yet it may also be sign or secret message; it will be read differently by different characters, just as by the reader herself, who reads over, as it were, characters’ putative shoulders.

The prismatic nature of the poem, its turning inability to remain “just text,” or “just address,” or “mere symbol,” or “absolute literal designation,” and on and on, is also exploited in exceedingly interesting ways in the American modernist context. The lack of (Romantic) mysticism or (medieval) intrigue is made up for in prosimetrical works that take the poem as an item capable of varying and destabilizing contemporary prose to ends at once aesthetic and political. Works by Jean Toomer and William Carlos Williams bring me to my third and final historical reason to combine, REASON THREE: you are bored with a certain (sad) status quo.  Toomer’s Cane , of 1923, presents a combination of modernist poems, clear and vivid in their depictions of American landscapes and persons, with short prose vignettes employing vernacular language along with song-like refrains. This unique book’s intent seems to be to bring into dialogue the values of high modernism and the everyday speech and African American folk culture of the South; it seems to have ambitions at once ethnographic and loftily, exactingly stylistic. William Carlos Williams meanwhile locates an American identity through improvisation and excess, re-describing both prose style and the capacities of verse through various modes of excerption, appropriation, and apostrophe, after a fashion that belies his reputation as a rigorous reducer of words into machine-like things. Though Williams wrote many books of mixed genre, Spring and All , published in the same year as Cane and home to the famous minimal poem including a “wheel / barrow,” is the scene of a particularly powerful explosion of speed-fueled prose typewriting; it’s a book of leaps and lashings, a seeming attempt to prove that poetry can invade the syntax of the American sentence, ecstatically. If it does not exactly promote the joy of romantic love, then it demonstrates the power of an encounter of another kind, between precise syllabic poems and a tumbling, rushing onslaught of prose. Like Cane , Spring and All is a comparative text; it invents new terms and tastes by way of contrast and association.

Above I have supplied three reasons, and though I like them fairly well, they do not, in the end, as is probably to be expected, exhaust all my thinking and feeling about varying, combinatory writing styles. I may care most about a mixture of styles because it allows the paranoiac in me to comment on the conservative literary (not to mention educational) systems that I fear linger in our world, in spite of—and sometimes even paradoxically by way of—the iconoclasm of modernist heroes et al. Verse is not just, to my mind, a form with various technical appurtenances, since it has a long history and specific social functions (inputs, outputs); like prose, it seems to me at times a sort of system, with myriad institutional nodes. Though I am not so heroic myself as to believe that my contemporaries are in need of saving, I do often find that some perverse aspect of me would very much like to make things a little bit messier, throw a wrench in the engine, and otherwise, pick your frustratingly well-worn metaphor, cause to function less smoothly said system of literary production. Most of all, stubborn being that I am, I find myself drawn to various styles of silence, said silence being a possible ingredient in, or sign of, the still, at least to me, unaccountable distance between poetry and prose.

Anyway, could we remove a poem from its job as a poem? A sentence, from its job as a sentence? What would we need to contribute to writing to cause such odd dismissals to transpire in a believable manner? What is the very smallest unit that can indicate plot, as such? What occurs (to us) when we are not sure what we are reading? To the extent that these aberrant questions have answers, they indicate the direction toward which some, though certainly not all, of my writing tends, which is to say, not toward the invention of new reasons for writing between and around and among established literary modes, but toward the invention of instances of contrast, that can in turn stand in stark contrast to the abundant supply of similarities I am sure to have found, in my perverse search for fresh difference.

Lucy Ives’s latest, The Hermit , is available now from The Song Cave.

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