HOW DOES POETRY DIFFER FROM PROSE?

Dear George, 

I’ve been taking poetry classes through UC’s OLLI program for the last 5 or 6 years. I don’t know if I’m getting any better, but I am enjoying myself. Katja is a Ph.D. candidate in French literature, and, from the beginning, she’s been telling me that my poems don’t sound very poetic. I’ve come to agree. My background is in scientific writing, the very opposite of poetic writing. My OLLI teacher agrees, saying that I write “prosy poems,” though he sees no problem in that. Every class I’ve been in winds up, at some point, discussing the differences between poetry and prose. I’ve asked Google about it, and here are some of the things experts say. 

Both “prose” and “poetry,” of course, refer to written literature. Prose is what we encounter most often in everyday life. Novels, short stories, nonfiction works, essays, newspaper and magazine articles, scientific papers, emails, blogs, and so forth ad infinitum. Various commentators say that prose is “regular” writing, while poetry is a more specialized form. I’m going to hazard a guess that prose constitutes about 99.9% of the written products out there in the world, leaving poetry with about 0.1% or less. To my knowledge, prose writers never worry about how prose differs from poetry. Only poets interested in the question, perhaps because their creations are specialand unique. 

Many authors compare and contrast poetry and prose. Here I am going to describe eight distinctions that are commonly made: structure; length; capitalization; punctuation; rhyme and meter; language; understandability; and purpose.

(1) STRUCTURE. The clearest and most obvious difference between prose and poetry is how they look on the page. Prose is written in sentences that are arranged in paragraphs. A line of text begins at the left and ends at the right margin of the page, with prose text appearing as large blocks of writing. Poems, in contrast, use shorter lines that are broken before the right page margin, and the lines are organized into stanzas. Thus, the shape of a poem varies, depending on the line and stanza breaks chosen by the author.    

(2) LENGTH. Poems are relatively short, like a painting in words, while prose is usually longer (think of an article or work of fiction). 

(3) CAPITALIZATION. In prose, the first word of every sentence is capitalized. Traditionally, poets capitalize the first letter of every line whether or not it corresponds to a sentence beginning. However, many modern poets do not follow this rule. 

(4) PUNCTUATION. Prose writers follow standard grammatical rules of punctuation (e.g., periods at the end of the sentence; commas to connect independent clauses ). Poets sometimes use standard grammatical rules, but they may also break rules for creative effect or not use standard punctuation at all (relying on line breaks instead of periods, commas, etc.). 

(5) RHYME AND METER. Historians suggest that poetry existed long before written language, and used rhythm and rhyme to help people to memorize information and hence pass down knowledge. Some argue that rhyme and meter are the most importance differences between poetry and prose. However, both rhyme and meter have been on the wane in poetry for many decades, and contemporary poets show a near-universal preference for free verse. 

(6) LANGUAGE. Prose typically relies on straightforward and literal language (e.g., the current essay), while poets often use figurative language (e.g., metaphor, similes, symbols) to create images or expressive ideas. Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.” 

(7) UNDERSTANDABILITY. Prose typically aims for a relatively clear message and usually requires only a single reading. Poems often leave a lot unsaid, rely on the imagination of the reader for interpretation, and may require more than one reading. My own opinion is that a lot of contemporary poets seem to worship ambiguity or obscurity and are needlessly frustrating to the everyday reader as a consequence. 

(8) PURPOSE. A quick summary is that prose aims to convey information, tell a story, or explain a concept in a clear way, while poetry focuses on expressing emotions and ideas in an aesthetically pleasing and evocative way. 

PROSE POEMS. It’s a mistake to regard “prose” and “poetry” as mutually exclusive, binary categories. There’s a lot of overlap and a lot of variety in each category. Prose can be highly expressive and employ metaphors and symbols. Poetry can be literal and descriptive, telling a story. The prose poem is a good illustration of the fusion of the two, since it employs the structural form of prose with the expressive language of poetry. Here is an excerpt from the prose poem, “Bath”, by Amy Lowell:  

      

“Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling.  I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar.  I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me.” 

It’s also possible to turn this around and consider poems which employ a standard poetry form but also use literal, descriptive language rather than flowery, “poetic” language. William Carlos Williams’ poem, “This Is Just to Say,” might be an example: 

I have eaten 

the plums 

that were in 

the icebox

and which 

you were probably 

saving 

for breakfast 

Forgive me 

they were delicious 

so sweet 

and so cold 

All of this points to a rather murky conclusion. It’s certainly possible to make generalizations about differences between poetry and prose, but both of these categories are so diverse that there are many exceptions to any assertion. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov sums it up best when he says that distinguishing poetry from prose “is rather like distinguishing rain from snow — everyone is reasonably capable of doing so, and yet there are some weathers that are either-neither.” 

Love, 

Dave 

SOURCES: brittanica.com, “Poetry(literature). ; immerse.education, “What Is The Difference Between Prose and Poetry?”; keydifferences.com. “Difference Between Prose and Poetry”; poets.org, “Poetry”; readwritethink.org, “Poetry and Prose: What’s the Difference?”; theadvocate.org. “The Difference Between Prose And Poetry”; tiatalk.me, “What is poetry?”; twinkl.com,“What is poetry?”; writers.com; “Prose Vs. Poetry: Their Differences And Overlap.”