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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.
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,Robert Hirsch, A Poet's Glossary, New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, . in which he used a literary genre of prose-and-poetry composition of multidimensional writing.Lowenstein, Tom, ed., Classic Haiku, London, Duncan Baird Publishers, 2007.
In the West, prose poetry originated in early-19th-century France and Germany as a reaction against the traditional verse line. The German Romantics Jean 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 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) and Aloysius Bertrand (in Gaspard de la nuit) 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 Illuminations.Stuart Friebert and David Young (eds.) Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem. (1995) Gedichte in Prosa. Von der Romantik bis zur Moderne. Vorwort und Auswahl, Alexander Stillmark, Frankfurt a. Main (2013) 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.
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 microfiction, including "Mold of the Earth" (1884), "" (1884) and "Shades" (1885).Christopher Kasparek, "Two Micro-stories by Bolesław Prus", The Polish Review, vol. XL, no. 1, 1995, pp. 99–103.Zygmunt Szweykowski, Twórczość Bolesława Prusa, p.99 His somewhat longer story, "" (1888), likewise shows many features of prose poetry.Zygmunt Szweykowski, Twórczość Bolesława Prusa, pp. 149, 183, 301, 444.
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 poet and writer Francis Marrash (1836–73) 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 (Ali Ahmad Said Esber, born 1930), a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.Robyn Creswell, "Hearing Voices: How the doyen of Arabic poetry draws on—and explodes—its traditions", The New Yorker, 18 & 25 December 2017, pp. 106–9.
The Modernism 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. 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."Donald Sidney-Fryer, "Klarkash-Ton and 'Greek'," The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton Smith, Scott Connors, ed. (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2006); reprinted in Donald Sidney-Fryer, Random Notes, Random Lines: Essays and Miscellanea (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2021), pp. 144-171. Canadians 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.
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. 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. A Curious Architecture: New British and American Prose Poetry, London, Stride Press, 1993.
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