difference between essay poetry

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Writing About Poetry

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

Writing about poetry can be one of the most demanding tasks that many students face in a literature class. Poetry, by its very nature, makes demands on a writer who attempts to analyze it that other forms of literature do not. So how can you write a clear, confident, well-supported essay about poetry? This handout offers answers to some common questions about writing about poetry.

What's the Point?

In order to write effectively about poetry, one needs a clear idea of what the point of writing about poetry is. When you are assigned an analytical essay about a poem in an English class, the goal of the assignment is usually to argue a specific thesis about the poem, using your analysis of specific elements in the poem and how those elements relate to each other to support your thesis.

So why would your teacher give you such an assignment? What are the benefits of learning to write analytic essays about poetry? Several important reasons suggest themselves:

• To help you learn to make a text-based argument. That is, to help you to defend ideas based on a text that is available to you and other readers. This sharpens your reasoning skills by forcing you to formulate an interpretation of something someone else has written and to support that interpretation by providing logically valid reasons why someone else who has read the poem should agree with your argument. This isn't a skill that is just important in academics, by the way. Lawyers, politicians, and journalists often find that they need to make use of similar skills.
• To help you to understand what you are reading more fully. Nothing causes a person to make an extra effort to understand difficult material like the task of writing about it. Also, writing has a way of helping you to see things that you may have otherwise missed simply by causing you to think about how to frame your own analysis.
• To help you enjoy poetry more! This may sound unlikely, but one of the real pleasures of poetry is the opportunity to wrestle with the text and co-create meaning with the author. When you put together a well-constructed analysis of the poem, you are not only showing that you understand what is there, you are also contributing to an ongoing conversation about the poem. If your reading is convincing enough, everyone who has read your essay will get a little more out of the poem because of your analysis.

What Should I Know about Writing about Poetry?

Most importantly, you should realize that a paper that you write about a poem or poems is an argument. Make sure that you have something specific that you want to say about the poem that you are discussing. This specific argument that you want to make about the poem will be your thesis. You will support this thesis by drawing examples and evidence from the poem itself. In order to make a credible argument about the poem, you will want to analyze how the poem works—what genre the poem fits into, what its themes are, and what poetic techniques and figures of speech are used.

What Can I Write About?

Theme: One place to start when writing about poetry is to look at any significant themes that emerge in the poetry. Does the poetry deal with themes related to love, death, war, or peace? What other themes show up in the poem? Are there particular historical events that are mentioned in the poem? What are the most important concepts that are addressed in the poem?

Genre: What kind of poem are you looking at? Is it an epic (a long poem on a heroic subject)? Is it a sonnet (a brief poem, usually consisting of fourteen lines)? Is it an ode? A satire? An elegy? A lyric? Does it fit into a specific literary movement such as Modernism, Romanticism, Neoclassicism, or Renaissance poetry? This is another place where you may need to do some research in an introductory poetry text or encyclopedia to find out what distinguishes specific genres and movements.

Versification: Look closely at the poem's rhyme and meter. Is there an identifiable rhyme scheme? Is there a set number of syllables in each line? The most common meter for poetry in English is iambic pentameter, which has five feet of two syllables each (thus the name "pentameter") in each of which the strongly stressed syllable follows the unstressed syllable. You can learn more about rhyme and meter by consulting our handout on sound and meter in poetry or the introduction to a standard textbook for poetry such as the Norton Anthology of Poetry . Also relevant to this category of concerns are techniques such as caesura (a pause in the middle of a line) and enjambment (continuing a grammatical sentence or clause from one line to the next). Is there anything that you can tell about the poem from the choices that the author has made in this area? For more information about important literary terms, see our handout on the subject.

Figures of speech: Are there literary devices being used that affect how you read the poem? Here are some examples of commonly discussed figures of speech:

• metaphor: comparison between two unlike things
• simile: comparison between two unlike things using "like" or "as"
• metonymy: one thing stands for something else that is closely related to it (For example, using the phrase "the crown" to refer to the king would be an example of metonymy.)
• synecdoche: a part stands in for a whole (For example, in the phrase "all hands on deck," "hands" stands in for the people in the ship's crew.)
• personification: a non-human thing is endowed with human characteristics
• litotes: a double negative is used for poetic effect (example: not unlike, not displeased)
• irony: a difference between the surface meaning of the words and the implications that may be drawn from them

Cultural Context: How does the poem you are looking at relate to the historical context in which it was written? For example, what's the cultural significance of Walt Whitman's famous elegy for Lincoln "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" in light of post-Civil War cultural trends in the U.S.A? How does John Donne's devotional poetry relate to the contentious religious climate in seventeenth-century England? These questions may take you out of the literature section of your library altogether and involve finding out about philosophy, history, religion, economics, music, or the visual arts.

What Style Should I Use?

It is useful to follow some standard conventions when writing about poetry. First, when you analyze a poem, it is best to use present tense rather than past tense for your verbs. Second, you will want to make use of numerous quotations from the poem and explain their meaning and their significance to your argument. After all, if you do not quote the poem itself when you are making an argument about it, you damage your credibility. If your teacher asks for outside criticism of the poem as well, you should also cite points made by other critics that are relevant to your argument. A third point to remember is that there are various citation formats for citing both the material you get from the poems themselves and the information you get from other critical sources. The most common citation format for writing about poetry is the Modern Language Association (MLA) format .

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• The Lit Hub Podcast
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• I’m a Writer But
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• Behind the Mic
• Lit Century
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• Emergence Magazine
• The History of Literature
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

5 Writers Who Blur the Boundary Between Poetry and Essay

"poets are the hoarders of the literary world".

There is a Bernadette Mayer writing exercise that suggests attempting to flood the brain with ideas from varying sources, then writing it all down, without looking at the page or what spreads over it. I have attempted this exercise multiple times, with multiple sources, and what I love about it—along with many of Mayer’s other 81 prompts—is that what comes out can literally take any form. The form is not dictated by the content I read, nor the rules of the exercise. The information I collect prior to writing may be entirely disparate, seemingly unrelated, but through the writing, it begins to take shape, and links are found. In the process of communicating information in a lyric way, barriers to form withheld, I am able to develop a richer portrait of what thinking really looks like.

I heard someone say once that poets are the hoarders of the literary world: collectors of facts, dates, quotes, newspaper headlines, ticket stubs, and love letters. Indeed, another of Mayer’s prompts is to keep a diary, or diar ies , of such useful things. As these journal pages begin to overflow, content spilling over the borders, the writing becomes something we might not always call a poem. Reflecting on his poetry collection The Little Edges and a book of essays The Service Porch , both of which appeared in 2016, poet and critic Fred Moten said , “The line between the criticism and the poetry is sort of blurry. I got some stuff in the poems that probably could’ve been collected with the essays.”

There is a long-standing tradition of poets who have refused genre, or reinvented it, and who continue to push the boundaries of form. Here are five, but just a cursory glance into any of their work will lead you to uncover many more.

Jenny Boully

The first essay in Jenny Boully’s latest collection Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life, published last month, is a journey into two illusive linguistic temporalities: “the future imagined and the past imagined. ” By positioning the reader in a space of hypothesis, Boully tests the limits of memory and lived experience, never quite allowing her reader to land on stable footing. With this linguistic trick, a redefinition of what is the personal begins to emerge.

Throughout her work, Boully is interested in reorienting the role of the reader from passive to participatory and reorienting the structure of the text from chronological to sensory. In an introduction to Boully’s work, Mary Jo Bang writes , “She uses form in a way that undercuts our every expectation based on previous encounters with poetry.” It’s no wonder that excerpts from her first book The Body , written as footnotes to an imaginary text, were included in both John D’Agata’s  The Next American Essay and The Best American Poetry 2002 .

Dodie Bellamy

Dodie Bellamy is a seamstress of language. Her work stretches the definitions of narrative writing by incorporating literary appropriation, cut-ups, collage, and détournement, or the act of turning a recognizable cultural product on itself, a technique developed by the Situationist International in the 1950s. Her poetic “cunt ups” take works of the traditional poetic canon and reinvent them with a contemporary feminist voice, directly splicing the historic masculine texts with pornographic imagery. The 2013 collection Cunt Norton employs the original language of 33 canonical poets, twisting them into erotic poems as an act of love for her predecessors. “These patriarchal voices that threatened to erase me—of course I love them as well,” Bellamy wrote of the work . Her experiments began to take a more prosaic form as she desired further space for her content. “I was writing linked poems that kept getting longer and more narrative,” she said in an interview .

Due to her inventive and often hysterical treatment of language, Bellamy’s voice is engaging on any topic. The themes she tackles in her collected essays When the Sick Rule the World range from the gentrification of San Francisco, her experiences with a women’s writing group and a moving tribute to the late equally inventive writer Kathy Acker, in the form of a catalogue of the contents of her wardrobe.

Claudia Rankine

When Claudia Rankine’s Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the judges’ citation read, in part, “It’s not (just) poetry.” The prose-poetry hybrid is a current throughout her work; her previous poetry title Don’t Let Me Be Lonely  was described, alongside Citizen , as “lyric essays” in the  The New York Review of Books . Rankine’s work uses investigative tools of poetry to probe what it means to be human and to encourage readers to examine their personal responsibility to others. Through experiments in form, she highlights the dangers of lazy classification of people and experiences; her words in any medium provoke self-reflection.

In Citizen , a 2015 essay on Serena Williams finds a comfortable home alongside prose and list poems. With her employment of the second person throughout the collection, Rankine prompts her readers to enter into the very experiences she is describing, whether they are wholly familiar or not. As such, her approach is in equal measure confrontational and humanizing.

David Rattray

When the poet, critic, and renowned translator David Rattray passed away at the age of 57 in 1993, the experimental writer Lynn Tillman wrote , “He swept us away also with his ‘bad attitude,’ his insubordination to authority and to the authority of what he knew.” This was true not just in the manner he lived his life, but also how he captured life in text. A principle translator of Antonin Artaud, Rattray’s own poems display a diary-like quality: they are grand narrations stuffed full of dates, places, people.

A collection of essays and stories exploring his relationship to close friends, grief, drugs, travel, and literature called How I Became One of the Invisible was put together by Chris Kraus just before his death. Through narratives that are at once breathless and directional, and full of poetic references and quotes, Rattray reveals his deep feelings for those with whom he shared his life. “He believed people were gems, precious, and treated them accordingly,” Betsy Sussler wrote , following his passing. And so too did he treat his words, allowing us to enter into his world imbued with sensitivity.

Maggie Nelson

Asked in an interview by Emily Gould as to how she decides on which genre(s) she will employ when writing a new book, Maggie Nelson replied , “Genre, for me, is determined by the unfolding of my interests, which is unknowable at a projects’ start.” Her defiance of category is not only evident in her bibliography, but in the bibliography of each book which makes it up. Bluets , which began as an investigation into the color blue and its varying manifestations throughout history, became a book of prose poems. The Art of Cruelty , a personal reflection on the employment of violence in art, became a book of academic criticism. Begun as a work of criticism, The Argonauts became a personal memoir, with its background research spilling, literally, into the margins. “I find my way to the right tone, idiom, form or set of subjects as I bumble along,” Nelson says.

It is her very adaptability of form and expression that has become one of her signature attributes, despite the literary world’s continued insistence on writerly classification, and in turn mimics the fluidity of her subjects. Hilton Als writes , “It’s Nelson’s articulation of her many selves . . . that makes her readers feel hopeful.”

Listen: Claudia Rankine talks to Paul Holdengräber about objectifying the moment, investigating a subject, and accidental stalking.

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Ruby Brunton

Previous article, next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

12 Famous Authors at Work With Their Dogs

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

In literary nonfiction, no form is quite as complicated as the lyric essay. Lyrical essays explore the elements of poetry and creative nonfiction in complex and experimental ways, combining the subject matter of autobiography with poetry’s figurative devices and musicality of language.

For both poets and creative nonfiction writers, lyric essays are a gold standard of experimentation and language, but conquering the form takes lots of practice. What is a lyric essay, and how do you write one? Let’s break down this challenging CNF form, with lyric essay examples, before examining how you might approach it yourself.

Want to explore the lyric essay further? See our lyric essay writing course with instructor Gretchen Clark. 

What is a lyric essay?

The lyric essay combines the autobiographical information of a personal essay with the figurative language, forms, and experimentations of poetry. In the lyric essay, the rules of both poetry and prose become suggestions, because the form of the essay is constantly changing, adapting to the needs, ideas, and consciousness of the writer.

Lyric essay definition: The lyric essay combines autobiographical writing with the figurative language, forms, and experimentations of poetry.

Lyric essays are typically written in a poetic prose style . (We’ll expand on the difference between prose poetry and lyric essay shortly.) Lyric essays employ many of the poetic devices that poets use, including devices of repetition and rhetorical devices in literature.

That said, there are few conventions for the lyric essay, other than to experiment, experiment, experiment. While the form itself is an essay, there’s no reason you can’t break the bounds of expression.

One tactic, for example, is to incorporate poetry into the essay itself. You might start your essay with a normal paragraph, then describe something specific through a sonnet or villanelle , then express a different idea through a POV shift, a list, or some other form. Lyric essays can also borrow from the braided essay, the hermit crab, and other forms of creative nonfiction .

In truth, there’s very little that unifies all lyric essays, because they’re so wildly experimental. They’re also a bit tricky to define—the line between a lyric essay and the prose poem, in particular, is very hazy.

Rather than apply a one-size-fits-all definition for the lyric essay, which doesn’t exist, let’s pay close attention to how lyric essayists approach the open-ended form.

There are few conventions for the lyric essay, other than to experiment, experiment, experiment

Personal essay vs. lyric essay: An example of each

At its simplest, the lyric essay’s prose style is different from that of the personal essay, or other forms of creative nonfiction.

Personal essay example

Here are the opening two paragraphs from Beth Ann Fennelly’s personal essay “ I Survived the Blizzard of ’79. ”

“We didn’t question. Or complain. It wouldn’t have occurred to us, and it wouldn’t have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten.

We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.”

The prose in this personal essay excerpt is descriptive, linear, and easy to understand. Fennelly gives us the information we need to make sense of her world, as well as the foreshadow of what’s to come in her essay.

Lyric essay example

Now, take this excerpt from a lyric essay, “ Life Code ” by J. A. Knight:

“The dream goes like this: blue room of water. God light from above. Child’s fist, foot, curve, face, the arc of an eye, the symmetry of circles… and then an opening of this body—which surprised her—a movement so clean and assured and then the push towards the light like a frog or a fish.” 

The prose in Knight’s lyric essay cannot be read the same way as a personal essay might be. Here, Knight’s prose is a sort of experience—a way of exploring the dream through language as shifting and ethereal as dreams themselves. Where the personal essay transcribes experiences, the lyric essay creates them.

Where the personal essay transcribes experiences, the lyric essay creates them.

For more examples of the craft, The Seneca Review and Eastern Iowa Review both have a growing archive of lyric essays submitted to their journals. In essence, there is no form to a lyric essay—rather, form and language are experimented with interchangeably, guided only by the narrative you seek to write.

Lyric Essay Vs Prose Poem

Lyric essays are commonly confused with prose poetry . In truth, there is no clear line separating the two, and plenty of essays, including some of the lyric essay examples in this article, can also be called prose poems.

Well, what’s the difference? A prose poem, broadly defined, is a poem written in paragraphs. Unlike a traditional poem, the prose poem does not make use of line breaks: the line breaks simply occur at the end of the page. However, all other tactics of poetry are in the prose poet’s toolkit, and you can even play with poetry forms in the prose poem, such as writing the prose sonnet .

Lyric essays also blend the techniques of prose and poetry. Here are some general differences between the two:

• Lyric essays tend to be longer. A prose poem is rarely more than a page. Some lyric essays are longer than 20 pages.
• Lyric essays tend to be more experimental. One paragraph might be in prose, the next, poetry. The lyric essay might play more with forms like lists, dreams, public signs, or other types of media and text.
• Prose poems are often more stream-of-conscious. The prose poet often charts the flow of their consciousness on the page. Lyric essayists can do this, too, but there’s often a broader narrative organizing the piece, even if it’s not explicitly stated or recognizable.

The two share many similarities, too, including:

• An emphasis on language, musicality, and ambiguity.
• Rejection of “objective meaning” and the desire to set forth arguments.
• An unobstructed flow of ideas.
• Suggestiveness in thoughts and language, rather than concrete, explicit expressions.
• Surprising or unexpected juxtapositions .
• Ingenuity and play with language and form.

In short, there’s no clear dividing line between the two. Often, the label of whether a piece is a lyric essay or a prose poem is up to the writer.

Lyric Essay Examples

The following lyric essay examples are contemporary and have been previously published online. Pay attention to how the lyric essayists interweave the essay form with a poet’s attention to language, mystery, and musicality.

“Lodge: A Lyric Essay” by Emilia Phillips

Retrieved here, from Blackbird .

This lush, evocative lyric essay traverses the American landscape. The speaker reacts to this landscape finding poetry in the rundown, and seeing her own story—family trauma, religion, and the random forces that shape her childhood. Pay attention to how the essay defies conventional standards of self-expression. In between narrative paragraphs are lists, allusions, memories, and the many twists and turns that seem to accompany the narrator on their journey through Americana.

“Spiral” by Nicole Callihan

Retrieved here, from Birdcoat Quarterly . 

Notice how this gorgeous essay evolves down the spine of its central theme: the sleepless swallows. The narrator records her thoughts about the passage of time, her breast examination, her family and childhood, and the other thoughts that arise in her mind as she compares them, again and again, to the mysterious swallows who fly without sleep. This piece demonstrates how lyric essays can encompass a wide array of ideas and threads, creating a kaleidoscope of language for the reader to peer into, come away with something, peer into again, and always see something different.

“Star Stuff” by Jessica Franken

Retrieved here, from Seneca Review .

This short, imagery -driven lyric essay evokes wonder at our seeming smallness, our seeming vastness. The narrator juxtaposes different ideas for what the body can become, playing with all our senses and creating odd, surprising connections. Read this short piece a few times. Ask yourself, why are certain items linked together in the same paragraph? What is the train of thought occurring in each new sentence, each new paragraph? How does the final paragraph wrap up the lyric essay, while also leaving it open ended? There’s much to interpret in this piece, so engage with it slowly, read it over several times.

5 approaches to writing the lyric essay

This form of creative writing is tough for writers because there’s no proper formula for writing it. However, if you have a passion for imaginative forms and want to rise to the challenge, here are several different ways to write your essay.

1. Start with your narrative

Writing the lyrical essay is a lot like writing creative nonfiction: it starts with getting words on the page. Start with a simple outline of the story you’re looking to write. Focus on the main plot points and what you want to explore, then highlight the ideas or events that will be most difficult for you to write about. Often, the lyrical form offers the writer a new way to talk about something difficult. Where words fail, form is key. Combining difficult ideas and musicality allows you to find the right words when conventional language hasn’t worked.

Emilia Phillips’ lyric essay “ Lodge ” does exactly this, letting the story’s form emphasize its language and the narrative Phillips writes about dreams, traveling, and childhood emotions.

2. Identify moments of metaphor and figurative language

The lyric essay is liberated from form, rather than constrained by it. In a normal essay, you wouldn’t want your piece overrun by figurative language, but here, boundless metaphors are encouraged—so long as they aid your message. For some essayists, it might help to start by reimagining your story as an extended metaphor.

A great example of this is Zadie Smith’s essay “ The Lazy River ,” which uses the lazy river as an extended metaphor to criticize a certain “go with the flow” mindset.

Use extended metaphors as a base for the essay, then return to it during moments of transition or key insight. Writing this way might help ground your writing process while giving you new opportunities to play with form.

3. Investigate and braid different threads

Just like the braided essay , lyric essays can certainly braid different story lines together. If anything, the freedom to play with form makes braiding much easier and more exciting to investigate. How can you use poetic forms to braid different ideas together? Can you braid an extended metaphor with the main story? Can you separate the threads into a contrapuntal, then reunite them in prose?

A simple example of threading in lyric essay is Jane Harrington’s “ Ossein Pith .” Harrington intertwines the “you” and “I” of the story, letting each character meet only when the story explores moments of “hunger.”

Whichever threads you choose to write, use the freedom of the lyric essay to your advantage in exploring the story you’re trying to set down.

4. Revise an existing piece into a lyric essay

Some CNF writers might find it easier to write their essay, then go back and revise with the elements of poetic form and figurative language. If you choose to take this route, identify the parts of your draft that don’t seem to be working, then consider changing the form into something other than prose.

For example, you might write a story, then realize it would greatly benefit the prose if it was written using the poetic device of anaphora (a repetition device using a word or phrase at the beginning of a line or paragraph). Chen Li’s lyric essay “ Baudelaire Street ” does a great job of this, using the anaphora “I would ride past” to explore childhood memory.

When words don’t work, let the lyrical form intervene.

5. Write stream-of-conscious

Stream-of-consciousness is a writing technique in which the writer charts, word-for-word, the exact order of their unfiltered thoughts on the page.

If it isn’t obvious, this is easier said than done. We naturally think faster than we write, and we also have a tendency to filter our thoughts as we think them, to the point where many thoughts go unconsciously unnoticed. Unlearning this takes a lot of practice and skill.

Nonetheless, you might notice in the lyric essay examples we shared how the essayists followed different associations with their words, one thought flowing naturally into the next, circling around a subject rather than explicitly defining it. The stream-of-conscious technique is perfect for this kind of writing, then, because it earnestly excavates the mind, creating a kind of Rorschach test that the reader can look into, interpret, see for themselves.

This technique requires a lot of mastery, but if you’re keen on capturing your own consciousness, you may find that the lyric essay form is the perfect container to hold it in.

Closing thoughts on the lyric essay form

Creative nonfiction writers have an overt desire to engage their readers with insightful stories. When language fails, the lyrical essay comes to the rescue. Although this is a challenging form to master, practicing different forms of storytelling could pave new avenues for your next nonfiction piece. Try using one of these different ways to practice the lyric craft, and get writing your next CNF story!

[…] Sean “Writing Your Truth: Understanding the Lyric Essay.” writers.com. https://writers.com/understanding-the-lyric-essay published 19 May, 2020/ accessed 13 Oct, […]

[…] https://writers.com/understanding-the-lyric-essay […]

I agree with every factor that you have pointed out. Thank you for sharing your beautiful thoughts on this. A personal essay is writing that shares an interesting, thought-provoking, sometimes entertaining, and humorous piece that is often drawn from the writer’s personal experience and at times drawn from the current affairs of the world.

[…] been wanting to learn more about lyric essay, and this seems a natural transition from […]

thanks for sharing

Thanks so much for this. Here is an updated link to my essay Spiral: https://www.birdcoatquarterly.com/post/nicole-callihan

I’m interested in learning about essays to write my memoir, so I shall be back.

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Advertisement

Supported by

The Poetry issue

The Shape of the Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry

“Poetry leaves something out,” our columnist Elisa Gabbert says. But that’s hardly the extent of it.

• Share full article

By Elisa Gabbert

I once heard a student say poetry is language that’s “coherent enough.” I love a definition this ambiguous. It’s both helpful (there’s a limit to coherence, and the limit is aesthetic) and unhelpful (enough for what, or whom?). It reminds me of a dictionary entry for “detritus” that I copied down in a notebook: “the pieces that are left when something breaks, falls apart, is destroyed, etc.” That seemed so artfully vague to me, so uncharacteristically casual for a dictionary. It has a quality of distraction, of trailing off, of suggesting you already know what detritus means. Part of me resists the question of what poetry is, or resists the answer — you already know what it means.

But let’s answer it anyway, starting with the obvious: If the words have rhyme and meter, it’s poetry. Nonwords with rhyme and meter, as in “Jabberwocky,” also are poetry. And since words in aggregate have at least some rhyme and rhythm, which lines on the page accentuate, any words composed in lines are poetry. There’s something to be said for the obvious. Virginia Woolf wrote of E.M. Forster: “He says the simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing one has overlooked.”

Is there much else? I think so. I think poetry leaves something out. All texts leave something out, of course — otherwise they’d be infinite — but most of the time, more is left out of a poem. Verse, by forcing more white space on the page, is constantly reminding you of what’s not there. This absence of something, this hyper-present absence, is why prose poems take up less space than other prose forms; the longer they get, the less they feel like poems. It’s why fragments are automatically poetic: Erasure turns prose into poems. It’s why any text that’s alluringly cryptic or elusive — a road sign, assembly instructions — is described as poetic. The poetic is not merely beauty in language, but beauty in incoherence, in resistance to common sense. The missingness of poetry slows readers down, making them search for what can’t be found. The encounter is almost inherently frustrating, as though one could not possibly pay enough attention. This is useful: Frustration is erotic.

“What is poetry?” is not the same question, quite, as “What is a poem?” How many poems did Emily Dickinson write? It depends what you count. In “Writing in Time,” the scholar Marta Werner writes, of Dickinson’s so-called Master letters, “At their most fundamental, ontological level, we don’t know what they are.” Perhaps my favorite poem of Dickinson’s is not, perhaps, a poem — it’s an odd bit of verse in the form of a letter to her sister-in-law, ending with the loveliest, slantest of rhymes: “Be Sue, while/I am Emily —/Be next, what/you have ever/been, Infinity.” Are the “breaks” really breaks? The letter is written on a small, narrow card; the words go almost to the edge of the paper. I think, too, of Rilke’s letters, which often read like poems. In 1925, he wrote to his Polish translator: “We are the bees of the Invisible. We wildly gather the honey of the visible, in order to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.” In these letter-poems, poetry reveals itself as more a mode of writing, a mode of thinking, even a mode of being , than a genre. The poem is not the only unit of poetry; poetic lines in isolation are still poetry. The poem is a vessel; poetry is liquid.

From time to time I’m asked, with bewilderment or derision, if this or that poem isn’t just “prose chopped into lines.” This idea of the free verse poem as “chopped” prose comes from Ezra Pound via Marjorie Perloff, who quotes Pound in her influential essay “The Linear Fallacy,” published in 1981. The essay encourages an oddly suspicious, even paranoid reading of most free verse as phony poetry, as prose in costume. The line, in Perloff’s view, in these ersatz poems, is a “surface device,” a “gimmick.” She removes all the breaks from a C.K. Williams poem to make the case that a stanza without the intentional carriage returns is merely a paragraph.

I find this baffling — as if chopping up prose has no effect. It does have an effect, the way putting more panes in a window changes the view. The architect Christopher Alexander thought big plate glass windows were a mistake, because “they alienate us from the view”: “The smaller the windows are, and the smaller the panes are, the more intensely windows help connect us with what is on the other side. This is an important paradox.” To state the Forsterian obvious again, adding breaks to a paragraph is not always going to make an interesting poem — but most poets don’t write that way. They write in the line , in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing . It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.

By “mystery” I don’t mean metaphor or disguise. Poetry doesn’t, or shouldn’t, achieve mystery only by hiding the known, or translating the known into other, less familiar language. The mystery is unknowing, the unknown — as in Jennifer Huang’s “Departure”: “The things I don’t know have stayed/In this home.” The mystery is the missing mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:

the / Butterflies monarch butterflies huge swarms they Migrate and as they migrate south as they Cross Lake Superior instead of flying

South straight across they fly South over the water then fly east still over the water then fly south again / And now biologists believe they turn to avoid a mountain

That disappeared millennia ago.

The missing mountain is still there. As for what is on the page, the language that changes the shape of the void, I’m of the opinion it can be almost anything. One of my favorite books that no one has heard of is “Survey Says!,” by Nathan Austin. It’s just a list of guesses ventured by contestants on “Family Feud,” arranged, most ingeniously, in alphabetical order by their second letter, so you get sequences like this: “A bra. Abraham Lincoln. A building. Scaffolding. Scalpel. A car. A card game. A cat. A cat. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream.” We get the answers; the questions are missing. “Get a manicure. Get a toupee. Get drunk. Retirement fund. Get out of bed. Get ready! Let’s go with manuals. Get sick in there. Let’s say a pet. Let’s say shoes. Bette Davis.” The poetry seems to perform hypnosis, the found rhymes and assonance and anaphora enacting an enchantment, a bewitchery; it seems to be giving subconscious advice. Get ready! You must change your life.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays and criticism, most recently “ The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays .” Her On Poetry columns appear four times a year.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

100 Best Books of the 21st Century:  As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics  and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

Examining Joan Didion:  Since her death, Didion has become a literary subject  as popular for her image and writing as for the fascination she inspired for almost half a century.

A Dutch Love Story in a Time of Silence:  In Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, “The Safekeep,” the writer spins an erotic thriller  out of the Netherlands’ failure to face up to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Aleksei Navalny’s Prison Diaries:  In the Russian opposition leader’s posthumous memoir, compiled with help from his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny faced the fact that Vladimir Putin might succeed in silencing him .

The Book Review Podcast:  Each week, top authors and critics talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

The Difference between an Essay and a Poem

Unlike a poem, it's highly unlikely anyone will ever want to set one of your essays to music. While some poems may set out to accomplish the same goals as an essay, such as presenting an argument or telling a story, the structure, common techniques, and basic rules required for an essay are quite different than a poem.

No matter what type of essay you're asked to write, such as argumentative, expository, descriptive, or narrative, there are usually structuring requirements that must be applied. An introductory paragraph that presents your ideas, a body that lays out each of those ideas clearly, and a summary paragraph that presents some type of conclusion are the common requirements for most traditional essays.

Poems, on the other hand, can vary widely in structure. Haikus, sonnets, limericks, and ballads are all forms of poetry and each is defined by its unique and specific structure. Poems can rhyme or not rhyme, be freeform or limited to a certain number of syllables, and they can fill a book or be written in 14 lines of iambic pentameter.

Techniques for writing a good essay include presenting ordered points that relate back to a single thesis statement, writing interesting and relevant topic sentences to present ideas for each paragraph, and presenting excellent supportive references from outside sources.

Poems, on the other hand, use alliteration, creative similes and metaphors, onomatopoeia, assonance, and rhyming lines. However, many poems include none of these. Unlike essays, there are no universal techniques used in good poetry. Creativity wins the day over following hard and fast rules.

Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation

Anyone who has ever submitted an essay assignment knows that grammar, spelling, and punctuation are key in a good essay. Every sentence should end with the proper punctuation mark, creative spelling is frowned upon, and an essay writer should proofread to ensure subject/verb agreement, sentence structure, and use of proper English.

In poetry, rules like these are often tossed out the window. Entire poems can be written with nary a punctuation mark in sight, and the creative use of language is encouraged.

In short, poems allow for a lot more creative freedom and can include a wide range of possible structures and techniques. An essay makes logical points that should be clear to anyone who reads it. Even the best poems, however, sometimes make sense to no one other than their authors.

• Key Differences

Know the Differences & Comparisons

Difference Between Prose and Poetry

The basic difference between prose and poetry is that we have sentences and paragraphs, whereas lines and stanzas can be found in a poetry. Further, there is regular writing in prose, but there is a unique style of writing a poetry.

We can find prose in newspaper articles, blogs, short stories, etc., however, poetry is used to share something special, aesthetically. To know more on this topic, you can read the other differences below:

Content: Prose Vs Poetry

Comparison chart, how to remember the difference, definition of prose.

The prose is an ordinary writing style in literature, which encompasses characters, plot, mood, theme, the point of view, setting, etc. making it a distinctive form of language. It is written using grammatical sentences, which forms a paragraph. It may also include dialogues, and is sometimes, supported by images but does not have a metrical structure.

Prose can be fictional or non-fictional, heroic, alliterative, village, polyphonic, prose poetry etc.

Biography, autobiography, memoir, essay, short stories, fairy tales, article, novel, blog and so forth use prose for creative writing.

Definition of Poetry

Poetry is something that arouses a complete imaginative feeling, by choosing appropriate language and selective words and arranging them in a manner that creates a proper pattern, rhyme (two or more words having identical ending sounds) and rhythm (cadence of the poem).

Poetry uses an artistic way to communicate something special, i.e. a musical intonation of stressed (long sounding) and unstressed (short sounding) syllables to express or describe emotions, moments, ideas, experiences, feelings and thoughts of the poet to the audience. The structural components of poetry include lines, couplet, strophe, stanza, etc.

It is in the form of verses, which constitutes stanzas, that follows a meter. The number of verses in a stanza depends upon the type of the poem.

Key Differences Between Prose and Poetry

The difference between prose and poetry can be drawn clearly on the following grounds:

• Prose refers to a form of literature, having ordinary language and sentence structure. Poetry is that form of literature, which is aesthetic by nature, i.e. it has a sound, cadence, rhyme, metre, etc., that adds to its meaning.
• The language of prose is quite direct or straightforward. On the other hand, in poetry, we use an expressive or creative language, which includes comparisons, rhyme and rhythm that give it a unique cadence and feel.
• While the prose is pragmatic, i.e. realistic, poetry is figurative.
• Prose contains paragraphs, which includes a number of sentences, that has an implied message or idea. As against, poetry is written in verses, which are covered in stanzas. These verses leave a lot of unsaid things, and its interpretation depends upon the imagination of the reader.
• The prose is utilitarian, which conveys a hidden moral, lesson or idea. Conversely, poetry aims to delight or amuse the reader.
• The most important thing in prose is the message or information. In contrast, the poet shares his/her experience or feelings with the reader, which plays a crucial role in poetry.
• In prose, there are no line breaks, whereas when it comes to poetry, there are a number of line breaks, which is just to follow the beat or to stress on an idea.
• When it comes to paraphrasing or summarizing, both prose and poetry can be paraphrased, but the paraphrase of the poem is not the poem, because the essence of the poem lies in the style of writing, i.e. the way in which the poet has expressed his/her experience in verses and stanzas. So, this writing pattern and cadence is the beauty of poetry, which cannot be summarized.

The best trick to remember the difference between these two is to understand their writing style, i.e. while prose is written ordinarily, poetry has aesthetic features, and so it has a distinctive writing pattern.

Further, the prose is that form of language which expansively conveys a message or meaning by way of a narrative structure. On the contrary, poetry is such a form of literature, with a unique writing format, i.e. it has a pattern, rhyme and rhythm.

In addition to this, prose appears like big blocks of words, whereas the size of poetry may vary as per the line length and the poet’s intention.

You Might Also Like:

Black M3 says

April 21, 2020 at 10:14 pm

Thanks for this site for the complete answer that have been given

Dolapo says

December 15, 2020 at 2:48 am

It has helped me too in my answer, so am so grateful for creating this article.

Sabu James says

May 25, 2021 at 2:52 pm

It was very much useful to me, thank you and congratulations.

Vivek Kumar says

September 7, 2021 at 7:51 pm

Nice work. Helped me a lot in my studies. Thank you 👍

Anthony Kaiser says

November 25, 2021 at 9:10 am

Nice representation on the comparison of the two

Kishwar Mirza says

July 18, 2022 at 9:56 pm

I respect everything that you have written in this blog. Please continue to provide wisdom to more people like me.

Moridiyat sulaimon says

September 5, 2022 at 8:29 pm

Thank you so much 👍👍👍 It was useful for me

khaemba james says

September 20, 2022 at 12:44 am

Enlightening and well illustrated. Thanks, it was useful.

Apostle Abraham J.B.Weah,I says

November 14, 2022 at 3:57 pm

I Haven’t Been So Inspired Reading Any Published Educative Resource Material As Compare To This Informative Useful Masterpiece. I Am Very Much Grateful And Hope To Remain A Student In This Resovoir Of Wisdom.

Shivratankohar says

December 19, 2022 at 7:49 am

Thanks, it’s given more on it. It is more useful to us

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

What’s the Difference Between Poetry and Prose?

19 Feb, 2024 | Blog Articles , English Language Articles , Get the Edge , Humanities Articles , Writing Articles

What are the key elements of poetry?

1. figurative language.

Figurative language quite simply means language that is not literal. This type of language is descriptive, and poets often use it to link a concrete object with an abstract idea. This non-literal description is used to invoke the reader’s emotions. 

A metaphor, for example, is a figurative technique; “the world is your oyster,” and “I could eat a horse,” are common metaphors. 

A simile is another example of figurative language. This is where the poet compares one thing with another to strengthen a description: for example in the final line of Sylvia Plath’s Mirror : 

“In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” 

Personification, the attribution of human characteristics to something non-human (e.g. “the wind howled”), and symbolism, the use of symbols to represent ideas or qualities, are also figurative techniques. 

These all serve to draw mental associations between the concrete and the abstract, and enhance the imagery of the poem. 

2. Rhythm and Metre

Poetry also often employs rhythmic patterns and metre. Rhythm refers to the rhythmic structure of a line, composed of two or more syllables, while metre is used to describe the pattern of emphasis, or lack of emphasis, on each syllable. Poets choose different rhythms and metres to impact the musical quality of the poem. 

For example, iambic pentameter is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama – most famously in the works of Shakespeare. 

Rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called “feet”. “Iambic” refers to the type of foot used: an “iamb” is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (e.g. the word “a-bove”). This creates the pattern: 

de/DUM de/DUM de/DUM de/DUM de/DUM 

“Pentameter” indicates that each line has five “feet” (think pent- as in “pentagon”, a shape with five sides). 

Consider Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream : 

“And I do love thee. Therefore go with me. I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee, And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep.” 

3. Line Breaks and Stanzas

Structure in poetry concerns how the poem’s different elements are organised. This includes: 

• Stanzas – a group of lines forming the basic recurring metrical unit in a poem; a.k.a a verse
• Line breaks
• Verse lengths 

Each impacts the way the reader experiences and interprets the poem.

For example, the Petrarchan sonnet organises itself into an octave, followed by a sestet. The first eight lines (often in ABBA ABBA rhyming scheme) raise a question that the next six lines, the sestet, answers. 

There’s typically a volta , or a turn, at the beginning of the sestet, indicating the change in the poem’s focus. Here, the way the poem’s stanzas are laid out can have a significant impact on the way the poem is read. 

These poems often concern love, and the volta in particular allows for narrative development in the poem. 

See Christina Rossetti’s After Death : 

“The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay, Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept. He leaned above me, thinking that I slept And could not hear him; but I heard him say, ‘Poor child, poor child’: and as he turned away Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.   He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold That hid my face, or take my hand in his, Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head: He did not love me living; but once dead He pitied me; and very sweet it is To know he still is warm though I am cold.”

Line breaks also influence the way the poem is interpreted. In After Death, Rossetti employs enjambment (when a phrase flows seamlessly from one line to the next with no punctuation) to reflect the continuity of domestic life. 

4. Rhyme and Sound Patterns

Rhyme schemes, assonance, consonance and alliteration all draw attention to individual words within a poem. These words are drawn together through the repeated use of sound. 

For example, alliteration is the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words. In The Raven , Edgar Allan Poe uses plosive alliteration in the phrase “doubting, dreaming dreams”. 

Sibilance, the creation of a hissing sound by the repetition of the letter “s”, is also used:

“Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore”. 

Assonance, the rhyming of two or more stressed vowels in nearby words, creates a sense of rhythm, dictating which syllables should be stressed when the poem is read aloud. It’s also employed in The Raven : 

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary”.

A poem’s rhyme scheme, the pattern that outlines which sound each line should end with, lends poetry its tell-tale rhythmic structure. For example, the ABAB rhyme scheme rhymes the end of every other line. 

See the opening stanza of Robert Frost’s Neither Out Far Nor in Deep :

“The people along the sand All turn and look one way. They turn their back on the land. They look at the sea all day.”

Poets often put a rhyme scheme in place, only to break the pattern half-way through. This can work like a volta to indicate a shift in the narrative or to emphasise a particular thematic point. 

Imagery is the poet’s use of vivid description and language to enrich the reader’s understanding and appreciation of the piece. 

See the opening of T.S. Eliot’s Preludes :

“The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots;” 

The array of images conjured elevates the scene, as if we too are there in the street, with leaves at our feet and the smell of smoky steaks at our noses! 

6. Emotional Resonance

Poets also use literary techniques to express strong or intense emotions, which can deeply resonate with readers.

In Daffodils, William Wordsworth uses simple language to evoke loneliness, wonder and felicity: 

“I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” 

Similarly, Audre Lorde’s If They Come in the Morning expresses a sense of danger and doom, as well as solidarity:

““If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

She uses the personal pronouns “you” and “we” to connect to the reader, strengthening our connection to the poem and its sentiments.

7. Ambiguity

Poetry can initially be difficult to interpret and understand due to its ambiguity. Oftentimes students find it hard to connect to a poem, and in turn lose enthusiasm for poetry as a literary form. 

However, ambiguity is part of what makes poems so resonant, interesting and evocative! Readers can engage with the poem on multiple levels and connect to the words more personally – ambiguity allows room for interpretation. 

As William Empson wrote in his book Seven Types of Ambiguity : 

“The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.”

8. Lyrical Language

Lyric poems use a variety of techniques to produce a songlike quality. 

A sonnet is a popular form of lyric poetry, using its rhythm, structure and descriptions to enhance its beauty and likeness to a song. For example, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 is notably lyrical, a quality that enhances the romantic and sentimental nature of the poem. 

9. Distinct Forms

There are a variety of poetic forms, including sonnets, haikus, villanelles and odes. 

Haikus are a Japanese form of poetry characterised by their unique syllabic structure. Each haiku is composed of three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. 

For example, here is one of the Japanese poet Bashō’s earliest haikus: 

“On a withered branch A crow has alighted; Nightfall in autumn.”

A villanelle is a French verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas.

What Is Prose?

Prose is a form of written language without the metrical structure and formal patterns that characterise poetry. 

What are the key elements that characterise prose? 

1. narrative and exposition.

Prose is commonly used to convey information, tell stories and provide explanations, making it a versatile form of written expression. All novels are examples of the prose form. 

Think of the Harry Potter series. Through prose, we’re told the story of a young boy who discovers he is a wizard, attends the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, meets his friends, learns spells and battles Voldemort. 

As a versatile form, prose doesn’t just tell stories. It can convey other types of information through news articles, recipes or school essays.

2. Full Sentences and Paragraphs

Prose adheres to grammatical and syntactical rules, consisting of complete sentences and paragraphs. This is in direct contrast with poetry’s experimentation with rhythm, line breaks and metre. 

3. Lack of Rhyme and Metre

There’s generally a notable absence of specific rhythmic patterns and structured metre in prose. This allows for a more fluid and natural flow of language – just as I am writing now! 

For example, the prose form allows dialogue in novels to feel natural and real. This extract from Ernest Hemingway’s Hills like White Elephants is a great example, as the dialogue effectively bounces back and forth between characters.

‘“Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.”   “And you really want to?”   “I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you really don’t want to.”   “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?”   “I love you now. You know I love you.”   “I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?”   “I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.”   “If I do it you won’t ever worry?”   “I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.”’

4. Concise and Detailed

Prose can be both concise and straightforward to deliver a message (for example a how-to guide), or descriptive and detailed to depict scenes and characters in literature. 

See the opening of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre : 

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.”

5. Logical and Coherent

Prose is generally organised logically with a coherent development of ideas. This means it’s very suitable for persuasive writing, argument and clarity. 

See any of Barack Obama’s speeches – he’s a skilled and persuasive writer and speaker, able to use language to suit his purpose and audience. 

6. Linear Narrative

Prose often follows a linear narrative structure, progressing chronologically from beginning to middle to end, while making use of narrative techniques. 

For example, tragedies often adhere to Freytag’s Pyramid, which follows the structure: 

• Introduction, 
• Rise, or rising action 
• Return, or fall
• Catastrophe

This formula is based upon the classical Greek tragedies of Sophocles , Aeschylus and Euripedes .

7. Versatility

Prose adapts to a wide range of genres and styles from creative fiction to academic research papers to a newspaper column. It’s the primary, and most versatile, form of written communication.

Blurring Boundaries Between Poetry and Prose

Although there are many differences between poetry and prose, these distinctions can sometimes blur. 

There are hybrid forms of writing which incorporate elements of both styles. For example, the French poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionised poetry in his prose poems, combining elements of both styles. Rather than incorporating line breaks, rhyme schemes, control of metre or assonance, Baudelaire employed conventions of prose writing such as paragraphs and dialogue. 

This created a condensed version of prose that took advantage of poetic devices like symbolism and imagery. Take a look at Baudelaire’s Be Drunk : 

“And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

Other writers who blur this boundary include Claudia Rankine, whose novel ​ Citizen showcases her prose-poetry hybrid. Her work has been called “lyric essays” by the New York Review of Books . 

Ocean Vuong’s acclaimed works, strikingly Time Is A Mother , also experiment with poetry and prose to explore grief, loss and memory.

There are many, many more canonical writers that blur this boundary, like Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath – all well worth exploring in depth!

Language is clearly not concrete, nor unchanging. Poets and novelists alike are always experimenting with form, technique and style. 

Be inspired to engage and experiment with a range of literary works, from confessional poetry to postmodernist literature to Baudelaire’s subversive prose poetry! Our summer programmes are hosted in Oxford, home to countless great writers over the centuries, and allow you to explore both poetry and prose in a supportive environment.

By Keziah Mccann

Keziah is a second-year French and Italian student at Balliol College, University of Oxford. As well as learning languages and travelling, her interests include writing, journalism, film and cooking.

Get a head start on your future!

Recommended articles

Best Universities to Study Medicine in the World

A degree in Medicine spans many years, so it’s important to make a good choice when committing yourself to your studies. This guide is designed to help you figure out where you'd like to study and practise medicine. For those interested in getting a head start, the...

What Is A Year Abroad?

One of the great opportunities offered to UK university students is taking a year abroad. But what does this involve? Who can do it? What are some of the pros and cons? In our year abroad guide, we’ll explain some of the things to bear in mind when considering this...

The Ultimate Guide To Summer Internships

Are you eager to make the most of your summer break and jumpstart your career? There are so many productive things students can do in the summer or with their school holidays, and an internship is one of the most valuable! A summer internship could be the perfect...