# Prose vs Poetry: What's The Diff?



## RonPrice (Mar 17, 2007)

PROSE-POETRY

Part 1:

Since I began writing poetry seriously some 15 years ago(1992-2007) I have found that the line between prose and poetry is a fine one. The prose-poem is the primary poetry form of the twentieth century, at least robert Bly said so in an in terview. This form allows me to blend the two forms into one whole.  The following account from a journal called The Henry James Review1 helped me to reinforce what often feels like an artificial distinction between prose and poetry. I quote from parts of the article by one Philip Horne.

 “I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death,” said John Keats in 1818. Henry James never went so far as to utter such a thought and isn’t literally, bodily that is, among the poets. Since 1976, however, there has been a plaque commemorating him in Westminster Abbey on the floor of Poets’ Corner which he once called “the great temple of fame of the English race.”  He is next to Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S. Eliot and at kitty-corners to Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  Where I shall be is a completely unknown quantity.  In all likelihood my grave shall be marked as is my wish in my will; in all probability I will be buried in a cemetary in George Town or Launceston Tasmania.

Part 2:

In the 1909 preface to The Golden Bowl Henry James speaks of the revising work of an author as the work of “a poet.”  In case readers think he means only writers of verse, he makes clear “that the title poet is only a title of general application and convenience. It is intended for those who passionately cultivate the image of life and the art, on the whole so beneficial, of projecting it.”  He goes on to say that the seer and the speaker under the descent of the god is the “poet,” whatever his form.  He ceases to be a poet only when his form, whatever else it may nominally or superficially be, is unworthy of the god: in which event, we promptly submit, he isn’t worth talking of at all.

James and his fellow-writers are, in other words, “seers,” speaking under the inspiration of a god who descends on them; and whether a writer’s form is “worthy,” James finally declares, depends not at all on “so minor a distinction, in the fields of light, as that between verse and prose.”  The mere fact that James writes in prose, then, is to him no disqualification for the noble title of poet. If a writer’s “form” is “worthy”—which I think means if it projects the image of life with a sufficient intensity or complexity—if its language attains a “poetic” weight or power, then the writer can be called a poet.

Edith Wharton tells us in her book A Backward Glance( Scribner’s, NY, 1964), “I never before heard poetry read as James read it; and I never have since.  He chanted it and he was not afraid to chant it, as many good readers are, though they instinctively feel that the genius of the English poetical idiom requires it to be spoken as poetry.  Many are afraid of yielding to their instinct for a special reading, a special production, of the poetry.  The present-day fashion is to chatter high verse as though it were colloquial prose.  James, on the contrary, far from shirking the rhythmic emphasis, gave it full expression.  The stammer he had ceased as if by magic as soon as he began to read and his ear, so sensitive to the convolutions of an intricate prose style, never allowed him to falter over the most complex prosody.  He was swept forward on great rollers of sound till the full weight of his voice fell on the last cadence.

Part 3:

James’s reading was a thing apart, an emanation of his inmost self, unaffected by fashion or elocutionary artifice. He read from his soul and those who never heard him read poetry knew what that soul was.  For James, poetry was about commemoration and a means of keeping a value, a person, a part of the past, alive.  Poems, to James, came to play a part in people’s lives and they rendered a service.  They came to be a stimulus and an inspiration.  One of the functions of poetry, he argued, was to communicate and preserve complex feelings and ideas, to sustain and unify a civilization. The language of poetry at its greatest intensity was a dazzlingly economical medium: it could trigger a complex set of compressed associations and powerful responses. “There were descriptive phrases and touches in some poetry which represented an extraordinary accumulation of sentiment, a perfect entanglement of emotion. To James this was the key to a civilisation.  James’ prose can be felt as “poetic” and it is in this sense that he belongs “among the poets.” –Philip Horne, Henry James Among the Poets, The Henry James Review, Winter 2005.

It is some combination of a deep
passivity-activity need in me that
makes me want to go all the way,
something to compensate for the
gregarious theatrical side of life
that drives me to this prose-poetry.            

Ron Price
17/3/'07 to 9/1/'15


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## ash somers (Jun 17, 2010)

i thought this topic might be an interesting one to revive

would anybody like to contribute on what they think / know to be

the key differences between prose and poetry, and what prose poetry is?

examples would be jolly fine and dandy - cheers, yours in poetry, ash somers


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## candid petunia (Nov 19, 2011)

Reviving again, I guess.


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## Cran (Nov 19, 2011)

> would anybody like to contribute on what they think / know to be
> 
> the key differences between prose and poetry



Well, before the internet, prose was about 5c per word, 

and poetry is in the ear of the beer-holder.


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## Nacian (Nov 22, 2011)

what's the Diff?
well it is the Erence one could say

I don't know that difference to be honest.It is a good question.
I think one is suppose to be a story written in a'purple style' and has a character or two with interactions.
 and  the other is called poetry and is almost like a citation or a flow of inner thoughst coming out  to express something a feeling, a desire or an imagery.


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## xlwoo (Mar 4, 2012)

about the difference between poetry and prose, the form is different and the writing style is different too. Poetry is in separate lines while prose is in paragraphs.  the different styles are difficult to say. about prose-poetry, in my opinion, it is the poetic style in prose form.


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## shadowwalker (Mar 4, 2012)

This is coming from someone who hasn't written poetry in decades, so patience if I'm way off base. 

Poetry has a distinct rhythm; which rhythm depends on the kind of poem. Prose does not have a rhythm as much as a pace - and that will vary within the prose.

"Purple prose", if not expected, is at least easily forgiven within a poem. Ditto rhyming and alliteration.

And, just from observing some discussions on writing poetry, it would seem there are a lot more actual rules based on the type of poem one is writing (ie, not just grammar rules).


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## Bloggsworth (Mar 4, 2012)

If the writer says it's a poem, it is a poem - But then again, Damien Hirst says what he does is art...


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## philistine (Mar 4, 2012)

Poetry, these days at least, is the ability to _adroitly_ hit the return key.


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## jeffrey c mcmahan (May 8, 2012)

Of all you prolific writers and above. xlwoo weighing at 82 posts hit the nail on the head. We can't argue about prose. Prose is writing complete sentences using appropriate grammar for the language you are writing in. When you add poetry to it. It means using conventional poetry techniques in your writing. Complete sentences, grammar, punctuation, are still required, and must still conform to a standard of prose style. The poetry part comes in, in the clever use of poetry conventions; i.e. metaphor, analogy, symbolism, simile etc. The purpose of choosing prose is so let you can go on, and on; without using excessive lines, or stanza's. If you want to write something factual, but highly controversial you brand it as poetry, so readers can say, oh, it's a poem, and go on with their lives. I have a 10, 000 word prose poem, the reason I call it it that, is so that, those who don't wish to believe it, can dismiss it. If that impress' you check out Nietzsche's, Thus spoke Zarathustra; or Lautréamont's, Les Chantes de Maldoror. They both have elements of prose, yet the expression of the content can only be poetic. My manuscript is not labeled as a prose poem, yet it is understandably poetry. People have to take of it what they will, freeing me, from having to include supportive arguments. Which would be required if I wanted people to accept it as a philosophy, or whatever. Even though it does contain a philosophy, and a science, and a theology, and an art. Presenting it as a poem is the thing to do, all in good form, and all of that. Now, since I mentioned it I'll go ahead and take an opportunity to drop a great plug of promotion on it, relieving me from having to visit an outhouse, any time soon. Wow!

The sublimation of Vapours

send me a comment, I'm feeling neglected. Heh

regards

jeffrey

 p.s. I enjoyed the citations in the lead off post.


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## Bloggsworth (May 8, 2012)

Simple - As a general rule, poetry has forced carriage returns, prose fills the complete width of the pages and flows over to the next line.


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## RonPrice (Jan 9, 2015)

*After 3 Years*

I thank all those who contributed to this discussion since I first posted on this thread over 7 years ago. The issue is capable of many permutations and combinations. I'll add some more.-Ron
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ON PROSE-POETRY

Part 1:

For many readers calling something poetry that is so very unlike any poem they have ever loved or read, is not just preposterous, but an insult against their very love of poetry, and their sense of the literary. To express this idea more moderately: "some poetry is just too unconventional  for words, for their literary proclivities."  

Not only do the “poems” of some poets and writers not look like anything their readers have ever read, but these poems often seem just too peculiar. If they are not peculiar, such poems are often either indecipherable or they are collections of words which your average reader would never approach and, if approached, he or she would quickly walk away after their first visual hit.

Part 1.1:

The poet Russell Edson (1935–2014) said that he wanted to write without debt or obligation to any literary form or idea, a poetry free from the definition of poetry. He also wanted to write a prose free of the necessities of fiction, free even of their author and his own expectations.  What made Edson fond of the kind of prose poems which he wrote, he said, was their clumsiness, their lack of ambition, and their sense of the funny.  If the finished product turned out to be a work of literature, this was quite incidental to his intentions. In other words, he thought of poetry as a cast-iron airplane that sporadically flies, chiefly because its pilot doesn’t seem to care if it does or does not. The real surprise comes when we realize that what we are reading is not the work of a jokester, but of a satirist and a serious thinker.1

Edson's prose poems deliberately fail to meet our expectations of prose. The disjunction between prose and prose poetry, at least Edson's, arises from his prose poems’ saying too much, saying not enough, or saying the wrong thing altogether. They just could never succeed as conventional prose. In the prose poetry that Edson writes the prose form does not necessarily give rise to a linear accumulation of meaning.  While co-opting prose’s verbal structures, Edson's prose poems imitate prose incompletely or incorrectly. They promise prose but botch the delivery.  Instead of a gradual accumulation of meaning, they offer an aggregation of meaning. In other words, different discursive threads may run alongside one another in the text of a prose poem, beginning and ending and connecting in unconventional places, or failing to connect altogether.2  I'll leave it to readers with the interest to check-out some of his many prose-poems.

Part 2:

My prose poems, on the other hand and unlike Edson's, do not fail to become prose due to some inappropriately timed turn-of-phrase, some understatement or omission, some timed loquacity, overstatement or overwriting, moments of unconventional, il logical, or incorrect reasoning.  My prose-poems tend to uphold prose’s tacit promise to accumulate sense. My prose-poetic techniques encompass the ways in which prose poems are, in fact,  prose. Still, for me, they succeed at being poems. In general, my poems yield aggregate sense and, sometimes, accumulated sense. 

My little pieces of writing do not begin at some position of mystery or obscurity and gradually yield sense. I try not to make of them a pastiche which vacillates between sense and obscurity as the poem unfolds. The physical end of one of my prose poems is often not the physical locus which makes the most sense to some hypothetical reader. Neither is the physical beginning of one of my little gems the locus of most obscurity.  My prose poems are, at least sometimes and at least for some of those who come to my work, anti-prosaic prose.2

Part 3:

I write many of my prose-poems as if I am trying to summarize the whole of a person's life, or some part of that person's life, or some part of history, or an event that might take several hundred pages in a good biography or history. I select, rather than invent images and ideas, from the great, the massive, number available. I try to use simple, familiar words but, often, the result, far from being easy, is a challenge to the information-base, the knowledge-base, of readers. The result, at least such is my aim, is to bring about a new kind of sense, a new meaning, something fresh and original, if not to all those who read my literary efforts, at least to some, to as many as possible.

Although the imagination and the interest inventory of my readers is often challenged, reading my prose-poetry is not necessarily an intellectual activity, an activity requiring great efforts to make out what I am trying to say. My prose poems should have "an easy-to-write look"; I don’t have to deal in rhyme, lineation, counting syllables, nor do I have to worry about length or the rhythm of the words, beyond a certain minimum of literary concern.  They’re easy to fake, but I'm into being genuine, transparent and simple, even if what I'm writing about challenges a reader. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Chales Simic, The Poets in the Distance,  The New York Review of Books, 28/5/'14; and 2 Sarah Manguso, Why the Reader of Good Prose Poems is Never Sad: An Appreciation of Russell Edson, Believer, March 2004.
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Sartre and Conrad

The pronouncement of philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, and activist Jean-Paul Sartre(1905-1980) that prose is an attitude of mind applies equally well to poetry. For Sartre the essay was an essentially dramatic form, the record of an encounter, the framing of a choice. Whether writing about literature, art, politics, or his own life, Sartre seizes our attention and drives us to grapple with the living issues that are at stake.1

Joseph Conrad(1857-1924), regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, associated the symbolic, suggestive, and inconclusive quality of prose writing specifically with poetry and art. To be a writer, Conrad wrote in a letter in 1895, "you must treat events as the outward signs of inward feelings," and to accomplish this "you must cultivate your poetic faculty.”2 

Conrad wrote in another letter: “A work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion.  For this reason the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character.  All the great creations of literature have been symbolic, and in that way have gained in complexity, in power, in depth and in beauty.”3 -Ron Price with thanks to: 1 We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975,  Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven, reviewed in The New York Review of Books, 4 June 2013; 2Joseph Conrad, "To Edward Noble: 28 Oct 1895,” The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume I: 1861-1897, editors Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Cambridge University Press, NY, 1983, p.252; and 3Joseph Conrad, "Letter To Barrett H. Clark," 4 May 1918, in Joseph Conrad on Fiction, ed. Walter F. Wright, University of Nebraska Press, Lincohn, p.36.
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PROSE-POEMS IN PROSE FORM

Section 1:

Most of my prose poems when first written on the page possess a form resembling a poem, but I could—and I sometimes do—write the poem out into a form that resembles prose more than poetry. John Keats and Emily Dickinson among others used letters to transmit poetry or, to put this idea another way, they formulated letters as poetry in order to exploit the poetic and the epistolary so that they inflect, enrich, even become one another.  The blending of genres in various ways and for a wide range of purposes results in an even wider range of effects and this has become a popular sport in recent decades.  I have come to see some of my own letters in a collection now spanning 50 years as a blend of literary genres. Indeed poetry and prose have become somewhat indecipherable in my mind's eye.  I have come to see poetry itself as natural, as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda puts it: “Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river.” 

My poetry is a blending of autobiographical elements, echoes of the literature of the social sciences and humanities and a steady stream of references to and influences from the Baha’i writings, history and teachings.  This evening I was reading about the English poet George Byron(1788-1824).  I was particularly struck by the fact that all of Byron's poetry is a blending of autobiographical elements and echoes of the literature he had absorbed over the years.  And so I felt a certain affinity to Byron as I read for this reason.  

Section 2:

His poem Don Juan is considered the most autobiographical of Byron’s works.  Almost all of Don Juan is real life either Byron’s or the lives of those whom he knew.  Byron started writing Don Juan on July 3rd 1818, eight months after the birth of Baha’u’llah.  He continued working on the poem in Italy and on his death in 1824 the poem remained unfinished.  Don Juan was a, perhaps the, poem that the working class took to heart in the mid-19th century, so Friedrich Engles informed us in 1844.  This poem reached the urban and rural poor and, for many, it was all they read besides the Bible.  It is very likely that most of these readers did not read any of Byron's other works.  As early as 1819 the work was regarded by the bourgeoisie as filthy and impious, although it was not fully published until 1901. Byron was regarded by Eliot as having contributed nothing and by Goethe as the greatest genius of his century.   

I came across an online seminar organized by the National Library of Australia entitled ‘Private Lives Revealed: Letters, Diaries, History’  and was particularly struck with an article by a Peter Read: Private Papers and a Sense of Place. The article was an analysis of the verse of the nineteenth century English poet John Clare.  Peter Read saw Clare’s verse as an interesting example of what he called ‘private papers.’  Clare's poetry was so eclectic, his language so personal and his personal involvement so touching, that Read thought Clare’s poetry was much more akin to a collection of private papers that we might find in a library than to the poetry of a poet.  However akin to private papers Clare’s poetry was, Read still thought Clare could have become one of the best-known poets of the nineteenth century.  In discussing why Clare did not become such a poet, Read quotes the cultural historian John Barrell’s views on Clare: “insofar as Clare was successful in expressing his own sense of place, he was writing himself out of the main stream of European literature." 

Accomplished poets and novelists are fully aware of the need for their readers to be able to generalise from the emotions which they as writers present about a particular place, event or person. The world view and life experiences of writers needs to find resonance with readers, if their writing is to be successful.  Private papers often reveal such private emotions.  Private emotions often reveal intense, ungeneralised concerns for particularities which hardly ever surface amongst the published, fictionalized and/or poetic works of professional writers.
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## Transcender (May 11, 2015)

Meter.


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