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Prose poetry is poetry written in prose form instead of verse form while otherwise deferring to poetic devices to make meaning.
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, [1] metaphor, and figures of speech. [2] Prose can still express the lyricism and emotion of poetry, and can also explore many different themes. There are subgenres within the prose genre, and these include styles like deadpan narrative, surreal narrative, factoid, and postcard. Prose offers a lot of creative freedom to writers, and does not contain as many rules as some poetic styles do. Many writers have different opinions on the form of this genre because it is so open, which makes it harder to objectively define. The prose genre has been used and explored by writers like Walt Whitman Franz Kafka, Naomi Shihab Nye and Anne Carson. Almost every form of art can be categorized under either the prose or poetry genre. Poetry covers forms like song lyrics, different poetry forms, and dialogue that contains poetic characteristics like iambic pentameter. On the other hand, prose includes novels, short stories, novellas, and scripts.
Although the Bible is written in prose, it maintains poetic features such as rhythms and lyricism. [3]
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 , [4] in which he used a literary genre of prose-and-poetry composition of multidimensional writing. [5]
In the West, prose poetry originated in early-19th-century France and Germany as a reaction against the traditional verse line.[ citation needed ] The German Romantics Jean Paul, Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Heinrich Heine may be seen as precursors of the prose poem.[ citation needed ] Earlier, 18th-century European forerunners of prose poetry had included James Macpherson's "translation" of Ossian and Évariste de Parny's "Chansons madécasses".[ citation needed ]
At the time of the prose poem's establishment as a form, French poetry was dominated by the alexandrine, a strict and demanding form that poets starting with Maurice de Guérin (whose "Le Centaure" and "La Bacchante" remain arguably the most powerful prose poems ever written [ according to whom? ]) and Aloysius Bertrand (in Gaspard de la nuit) chose, in almost complete isolation, to cease using.[ citation needed ] Later Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé followed their example in works like Paris Spleen and Illuminations . [6] [7] 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.[ citation needed ]
In Poland, Juliusz Słowacki wrote a prose poem, Anhelli , in 1837. Bolesław Prus (1847–1912), influenced by the French prose poets, wrote a number of poetic micro-stories, including "Mold of the Earth" (1884), "The Living Telegraph" (1884) and "Shades" (1885). [8] [9] His somewhat longer story, "A Legend of Old Egypt" (1888), likewise shows many features of prose poetry. [10]
In 1877–1882 Russian novelist Turgenev wrote several 'Poems in prose' (Стихотворения в прозе) which have neither poetic rhythm nor rhymes but resemble poetry in concise but expressive form.
The writings of Syrian poet and writer Francis Marrash (1836–73) featured the first examples of prose poetry in modern Arabic literature. [11] From the mid-20th century, the great Arab exponent of prose poetry was the Syrian poet, Adunis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber, born 1930), a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. [12]
The Modernist poet T. S. Eliot wrote vehemently against prose poems.[ citation needed ] 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.[ citation needed ] By contrast, other Modernist authors, including Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, consistently wrote prose poetry.[ citation needed ] Poet and critic Donald Sidney-Fryer, a leading scholar of the works of American poet Clark Ashton Smith, praised "the extremely picturesque or pictorial character of many of Smith's typical, far-ranging, and most polished fantasies, his extended poems in prose." [13] Canadian author Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945) is a relatively isolated example of mid-20th-century English-language poetic prose.[ citation needed ]
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.[ citation needed ] Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1989 collection, The World Doesn't End. [14]
Since the late 1980s, prose poetry has gained in popularity.[ citation needed ] Journals have begun specializing in prose poems or microfiction.[ citation needed ] In the United Kingdom, Stride Books published a 1993 anthology of prose poetry, A Curious Architecture. [15]
Poetry is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, literal or surface-level meanings. Any particular instance of poetry is called a poem and is written by a poet. Poets use a variety of techniques called poetic devices, such as assonance, alliteration, euphony and cacophony, onomatopoeia, rhythm, and sound symbolism, to produce musical or other artistic effects. Most written poems are formatted in verse: a series or stack of lines on a page, which follow a rhythmic or other deliberate structure. For this reason, verse has also become a synonym for poetry.
Aleksander Głowacki, better known by his pen name Bolesław Prus, was a Polish novelist, a leading figure in the history of Polish literature and philosophy, as well as a distinctive voice in world literature.
Flash fiction is a brief fictional narrative that still offers character and plot development. Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story; the 280-character story ; the "dribble" ; the "drabble" ; "sudden fiction" ; "flash fiction" ; and "microstory".
Haibun is a prosimetric literary form originating in Japan, combining prose and haiku. The range of haibun is broad and frequently includes autobiography, diary, essay, prose poem, short story and travel journal.
Polish Positivism was a social, literary and philosophical movement that became dominant in late-19th-century partitioned Poland following Romanticism in Poland and the suppression of the January 1863 Uprising against the Russian Empire. The Positivist period lasted until the turn of the 20th century and the advent of the modernist Young Poland movement.
"Mold of the Earth" is one of the shortest micro-stories by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus.
"Shades" is one of Bolesław Prus' shortest micro-stories. Written in 1885, it comes from a several years' period of pessimism in the author's life caused partly by the 1883 failure of Nowiny (News), a Warsaw daily that he had been editing less than a year. Prus, the "lamplighter" who had striven to dispel darkness and its attendant "fear, errancy, and crime," had failed to sufficiently interest the public in his "observatory of societal facts," Nowiny.
Pharaoh is the fourth and last major novel by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus (1847–1912). Composed over a year's time in 1894–95, serialized in 1895–96, and published in book form in 1897, it was the sole historical novel by an author who had earlier disapproved of historical novels on the ground that they inevitably distort history.
Zygmunt Szweykowski was a historian of Polish literature who specialized in 19th-century Polish prose.
Christopher Kasparek is a Scottish-born writer of Polish descent who has translated works by numerous Polish authors, including Ignacy Krasicki, Bolesław Prus, Florian Znaniecki, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Marian Rejewski, and Władysław Kozaczuk, as well as the Polish–Lithuanian Constitution of 3 May 1791.
"A Legend of Old Egypt" is a seven-page short story by Bolesław Prus, originally published January 1, 1888, in New Year's supplements to the Warsaw Kurier Codzienny and Tygodnik Ilustrowany. It was his first piece of historical fiction and later served as a preliminary sketch for his only historical novel, Pharaoh (1895), which would be serialized in the Illustrated Weekly.
Renku, or haikai no renga, is a Japanese form of popular collaborative linked verse poetry. It is a development of the older Japanese poetic tradition of ushin renga, or orthodox collaborative linked verse. At renku gatherings participating poets take turns providing alternating verses of 17 and 14 morae. Initially haikai no renga distinguished itself through vulgarity and coarseness of wit, before growing into a legitimate artistic tradition, and eventually giving birth to the haiku form of Japanese poetry. The term renku gained currency after 1904, when Kyoshi Takahama started to use it.
The Doll is the second of four acclaimed novels by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus. It was composed for periodical serialization in 1887–1889 and appeared in book form in 1890.
The Outpost was the first of four major novels by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus. The author, writing in a Poland that had been partitioned a century earlier by Russia, Prussia and Austria, sought to bring attention to the plight of rural Poland, which had to contend with poverty, ignorance, neglect by the country's upper crust, and colonization by German settlers backed by Otto von Bismarck's German government.
The New Woman is the third of four major novels by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus. It was composed, and appeared in newspaper serialization, in 1890-93, and dealt with societal questions involving feminism.
The Wieliczka Salt Mine is a salt mine in the town of Wieliczka, near Kraków in southern Poland.
Haikai may refer in both Japanese and English to haikai no renga (renku), a popular genre of Japanese linked verse, which developed in the sixteenth century out of the earlier aristocratic renga. It meant "vulgar" or "earthy", and often derived its effect from satire and puns, though "under the influence of [Matsuo] Bashō (1644–1694) the tone of haikai no renga became more serious". "Haikai" may also refer to other poetic forms that embrace the haikai aesthetic, including haiku and senryū, haiga, and haibun. However, haikai does not include orthodox renga or waka.
'The Rhapsodic Fallacy' is an essay by United States poet Mary Kinzie in which she defines and attacks a "rhapsodic" conception of poetry. It was first published in Salmagundi of Fall 1984 and was collected in The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling, and a somewhat shorter version of the essay was later anthologized in Twentieth-Century American Poetics The essay was one of several of the mid-1980s that sparked a heated discussion over the role of form in American poetry, and was thus implicated in the formation of the New Formalism movement.
"Fading Voices" is an 1883 short story by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus, the leading representative of Realism in 19th-century Polish literature.
The Temple of the Sibyl is a colonnaded round monopteral temple-like structure at Puławy, Poland, built at the turn of the 19th century as a museum by Izabela Czartoryska.