Prose poetry is poetry written in prose form instead of verse form, while preserving poetic qualities such as heightened imagery, parataxis, and emotional effects.
Characteristics
Prose poetry is written as prose, without the line breaks associated with poetry. However, it makes use of poetic devices such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, rhyme, metaphor, and figures of speech.
History
In 17th-century Japan, Matsuo Bashō originated haibun, a form of prose poetry combining haiku with prose. It is best exemplified by his book Oku no Hosomichi, in which he used a literary genre of prose-and-poetry composition of multidimensional writing. In the West, prose poetry originated in early-19th-century France and Germany as a reaction against the traditional verse line. The German RomanticsJean Paul, Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Heinrich Heine may be seen as precursors of the prose poem. Earlier, 18th-century European forerunners of prose poetry had included James Macpherson's "translation" of Ossian and Évariste de Parny's "Chansons madécasses". At the time of the prose poem's establishment as a form, French poetry was dominated by the Alexandrin, a strict and demanding form that poets starting with Maurice de Guérin and Aloysius Bertrand chose, in almost complete isolation, to cease using. Later Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé followed their example in works like Paris Spleen and Les Illuminations. The prose poem continued to be written in France into the 20th century by such writers as Max Jacob, Henri Michaux, Gertrude Stein, and Francis Ponge. Throughout the nineteenth century, Germany and Austria produced a large body of prose poetry, without calling it that. In Poland, Juliusz Słowacki wrote a prose poem, Anhelli, in 1837. Bolesław Prus, influenced by the French prose poets, wrote a number of poetic micro-stories, including "Mold of the Earth", "" and "Shades". His somewhat longer story, "", likewise shows many features of prose poetry. At the end of the 19th century, British Decadent poets such as Oscar Wilde began using the form. Other writers of prose poetry have included Hans Christian Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe, Ivan Turgenev, Walt Whitman, Maurice Maeterlinck, Stefan George, Amy Lowell, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Georg Trakl, Fenton Johnson, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Ángel Crespo. In 20th-century Latin American letters, Spanish-language prose poetry is a prevalent art form. The Mexican author Octavio Paz wrote a prose-poetry work, Aguila o Sol?. The Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi has written a prose-poem trilogy with the collective titleEmpire of Dreams. The Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector also wrote prose poems in Spanish. Translator Dennis Keene presented the work of six Japanese prose poets in The Modern Japanese Prose Poem: an Anthology of Six Poets. Adrian Wanner and Caryl Emerson described the form's growth in Russia in their critical work, Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-story. The writings of Syrian poet and writer Francis Marrash featured the first examples of prose poetry in modern Arabic literature. From the mid-20th century, the great Arab exponent of prose poetry was the Syrian poet Adunis, a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. The Modernist poet T. S. Eliot wrote vehemently against prose poems. He added to the debate about what defines the genre, writing in his introduction to Djuna Barnes' highly poeticized 1936 novel Nightwood that it could not be classed as "poetic prose" as it did not show the rhythm or "musical pattern" of verse. By contrast, other Modernist authors, including Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, consistently wrote prose poetry. Canadian author Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is a relatively isolated example of mid-20th-century English-language poetic prose. Prose poems made a resurgence in the early 1950s and in the 1960s with American poets Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Russell Edson, Charles Simic, Robert Bly, John Ashbery, and James Wright. Edson worked principally in this form, and helped give the prose poem a reputation for surrealist wit. Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1989 collection, The World Doesn't End. Since the late 1980s, prose poetry has gained in popularity. Journals have begun specializing in prose poems or microfiction. In the United Kingdom, Stride Books published a 1993 anthology of prose poetry, A Curious Architecture.
