Okay, I’m back. And I’m being asked to talk about what the difference is between prose and poetry. I’ve seen this debate on poetry message boards, where someone posts up a poem for critique and someone else says: “That is terrible. It’s not a poem.”
And you’re like, what? What kind of a thing is that to say?
Sometimes someone says, “That’s just lineated prose.”
Again: what?
So it seems that one way of talking about prose – especially among poets – is to start by talking about poetry. After all, the concept of “prose” only exists in our world as a counterfoil for “poetry,” or “verse.” (I differentiate partly because “verse” implies versification – i.e., prosody – whereas “poetry” doesn’t need, these days, overtly to have it. Note all the qualifiers.)
It seems to me that a good place to start looking at this binary is with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous remark that:
The definition of good prose is – proper words in their proper places; of good verse – the most proper words in their proper places. The words in prose ought to express their intended meaning, and no more… But in verse, you must do more; there the words [are] the media…
Very prescient of him, I think. And then there’s Yeats, writing to Lady Wellesley – specifically about poetry as opposed to prose – that, “The correction of prose, because it has no laws, is endless; a poem comes right with a click like a closing box.”
We could ask the novelists what they think about that “no laws” remark; it’s tempting to say prose has more laws, and poetry ust has more of a guideline… And it is possible there is a single moment when novelists know they’re done; maybe it just isn’t like a click.
Housman said: “Poetry is not the thing said but the way of saying it.” He also said, “Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not.” And he said “Poetry indeed seems to be more physical than intellectual.”
This is where you get into the idea that poetry is partly about, not only sound, but the movement of the sounds through both the ear and the mouth; rhythm and pattern, on either the large scale or at letter or sound level. It’s abut waves and reverberations.
One of the most particular prose stylists of the late 19th century was, surprisingly, RL Stevenson. He would write and rewrite to get the assonance right, to get the sounds to work in service of the thing. But he was definitely writing prose. He’d have said so.
One way of thinking about it is to think of prose as something that can be paraphrased. As Frost said: “poetry is what’s lost in translation.” So you can translate prose – a novel, say – and even with the odd infelicitous word or clunky phrase, you get the meaning and can understand the point.
Try that with Mallarmé* or Celan.
And what about prose poems? Are they poems because each word is particular and necessary to a meta-meaning, and no word can be replaced?(I’m asking; I’m really asking! I find prose poems harder to read than poetry-poems. I’ve written a couple, two or three, and they did come to me differently, and defied the line. But I can’t define it. And then someone said to me once that when I read one of them out it was in metre – which it had defied on the page – so who knows?)
On the whole, I think the kind of poetry that gives poetry a good name is the kind where you can’t “describe what it’s about” because the whole thing is so integral: lineation, word play, double meanings, sonic effects, the particular timbre of a set of allusions or changes in register (though you can do many of these things in prose). As Auden said, “A poem must be a closed system.” An ecosystem, if you like.
To say any of this, of course, is to invite the exceptions: the Sebalds, the Steins, the other people who don’t begin with S…
But just for the sake of argument, let’s say a poem is a closed system. And, except for the the subset “bad poetry”, prose is everything else…
* Here’s a good description from Wikipedia of the kind of thing I mean:
Some consider Mallarmé one of the French poets most difficult to translate into English. The difficulty is due in part to the vague nature of much of his work, but mostly to the important role that the sound of the words, rather than their meaning, plays in his poetry. When recited in French, his poems allow alternative meanings which are not evident on reading the work on the page. For example, Mallarmé’s Sonnet en ‘-yx’ opens with the phrase ses purs ongles (‘her pure nails’), whose first syllables when spoken aloud sound very similar to the words c’est pur son (‘it’s pure sound’). Indeed, the ‘pure sound’ aspect of his poetry has been the subject of musical analysis and has inspired musical compositions.
16 Comments
October 25, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Dear Katy
I think that the simplest definition of the difference between poetry and prose is that ‘Prose is plain speech whereas poetry is closer to song.’ (‘Aphorisms After Oscar’ franglo.com) The people I really admire are people like you and Jane Holland and my wife Rusty who seem to find poetry and prose equally easy. I’m not a bad poet but I’m hopeless at prose!
Best wishes from Simon
October 25, 2009 at 2:44 pm
“One way of thinking about it is to think of prose as something that can be paraphrased.”
I don’t have an alternative definition to offer, but I’m not sure about the above. I can cite many of examples of translated poems in languages that I understand. Meaning comes through well, depending on the technical skill and emotional depth and maturity of the translator.
The more I think about it, the less convinced I am that there is a distinction between prose and poetry. There are differences, for sure, examples being the economy of words used in poetry, and poets’ attention to the musical aspects of language. But that’s it, as far as I can see.
October 25, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Can never resist this particular debate, Katy! I think its a false dichotomy that’s set up between poetry and prose. We know what a poem looks like, but nobody ever says “Oh, I like this prose”, they say I like this “story” or “novel” or “article”. Therefore its the unit of a poem, as much as the content that makes it poetry (hence the prose poem.) Then there’s micro-fiction, (such as David Gaffney for instance), if a poet writes it (like Luke Kennard) they’ll tend to say its a poem, if its a fiction writer, they’ll say short story. “Tender Buttons” by Gertrude Stein reads like poetry, but its prose, because she says it is. Saying that “Prose is plain speech whereas poetry is closer to song” isn’t really helpful when faced with Frank O’Hara at his very best. You could take a few lines of a Fitzgerald novel and lay them out as poem, but why would you? I like the idea that poetry can’t be paraphrased and prose can be, but too much poetry can be paraphrased – it doesn’t make it bad necessarily, but it means it doesn’t tend to the metaphysical. (Think of Ted Hughes’s “The Wind”, far easier to paraphrase that, than a Borges story for instanace). I kind of think, 75 years after William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to say”, that even chopped up prose can be a poem if it wants to be.
October 25, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Hi guys, well the interesting thing was that, when writing this post, I kept writing myself into a corner where there is no difference at all between prose and poetry. It is the inevitable conclusion of any really thoughtful discussion of the subject. And yet, and yet, we “know a poem when we see it.” And there are things – even things besides reaching both margins – that all kinds of prose may have in common, that they don’t have in common with poetry – even while they share other characteristics, as with Stein or Borges? Is it like a disease, where you have it if you have x number of the symptoms in varying combinations?
Does it matter? Is it like the urinal that’s “art”? I was kind of hoping more people would comment on this one…
October 25, 2009 at 8:33 pm
MacNeice called lyric poems monodramas. I think poems are generally more self-conscious (than essays, stories, novels, etc.), more aware of being worldlets, objects in space.
Then there is this, from Helen Vendler, on the difference between poetry and novels:
‘While the novel, unstoppable, wants to keep reeling us into its labyrinth, the unjustified margin of poetry pulls us up, even if gently, at the end of each line. (Even the prose poem, by its sheer density, forces an interruption on us at the end of each sentence, a practice that would be fatal to a novel). In the perpetual self-halting of poetry must lie its peculiar attraction. It insists on a spooling, a form of repetition, the reinscribing of a groove, the returning upon an orbit already traced. Lyric poetry, for all its plot, its logic, its conclusions — is profoundly unlinear. It does not advance. (Perhaps it does not advance even in the way Coleridge thought it did, like a snake doubling back on itself with each motion). Poetry, instead, looks — and looks again. Its second look may be different from the first, but it looks again at the same thing. It does not progress to a new vista. Every poem is, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “one last look at the ducks”.’
October 25, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Forgot to add that one of the things I appreciate about poems is their portability, that you can carry many of them (or significant parts anyway) in your head. If they are resonant enough they hold up like a remembered piece of music.
October 25, 2009 at 10:35 pm
So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
L.H.O.O.Q.
p.s. Thank you Mr. Slatcher
October 26, 2009 at 6:02 am
[...] when is it a poem? when is it prose? [...]
October 26, 2009 at 10:04 am
Does Nick Laird’s comment from this Saturday’s Guardian Review help or hinder?
“… poetry that restricts itself to forms [is] kind of what poetry means, though the restrictions can be practically anything. See Homer, or Shakespeare, or OuLiPo. For there to be form, there must be some restriction. A form is restriction. But there are no rules as to what the restriction might be. As for vers libre, well, as Eliot said: ‘No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job’”
October 26, 2009 at 10:10 am
Yes Andy. You might like this, from Paul Muldoon: “Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.”
So maybe it turns out that, because prose has so many functions, it can only be seen as a diffuse opposite shore to poetry…? Maybe the thing is really about function, not – ahem – form. So Borges, even writing “prose,” is a poet.
October 26, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Poems are like plants: they make their own oxygen.
But poem/not poem is as ineffable as good poem/bad poem: you just know.
In the workshops of my distant past, we would never tell anyone their poem sucked. What could be praised was praised, and minor concrete flaws remarked upon. But almost always, had the poem been any good, these flaws would not have been material.
October 26, 2009 at 2:28 pm
‘Poems are like plants: they make their own oxygen.’
Yes, and their own micro-climates.
But I think Vendler’s definition is among the best I’ve read: ‘Every poem is, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “one last look at the ducks”.’
October 26, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I went last week to a reading by a poet who also writes prose (he read from both, and you could tell immediately which was which by the way he voiced what was on the page). These days it’s mostly poetry; asked if there’d be another book of prose, he said that switching from one to the other was like turning around a massive supertanker at sea. Different channels, different wavelengths.
October 26, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Charles, I think I know the one you mean, I’d have loved to go. I’d have been double-booked. It’s a great description, and says as much – from the point of view of the experience of actually writing the stuff – as anything we’ve said above to delineate the difference.
Mark, forgot to say last night that “unjustified margins of poetry” is SUCH a great phrase, like a moral conundrum! I also love the ducks.
October 26, 2009 at 10:37 pm
i’ve read and written too many essays and such on prose poetry in particular so this discussion was so interesting to me.
for me, poetry is trying to say something through the power of individual words as they form into a whole.
prose, is trying to say something through the accumulation of sentences.
and even that just sounds not quite there….
great discussion!
October 30, 2009 at 11:27 am
[...] & prose Some of us have a hard time telling the difference between the two. Hackney scribe Ms Baroque takes time off from her own versifying to shed some light on the [...]