To what extent can we think of prose poetry as 'poetic'?

The admission of prose into the poetic pantheon has been hotly debated. It is fitting that Charles Baudelaire's seminal prose poetry collection 'Le Spleen de Paris' (1869), was published posthumously, ushering in a crucial aspect of literary modernism only after the death of its author, a canonical writer of lyrical verse. Poetry and its suggestive powers have always been associated with the formal aspects of musical and rhythmic effects (rhyme and meter). On the page, too, a poem looks like a special, privileged act of language because it has so much white space around it. A prose poem, on the other hand, is organised in paragraphs rather than stanzas, which gives the genre a more everyday, 'prosaic' feel. If we consider poetry as an elevated art above the mundane, then ‘prose poetry’ can seem like a paradox. It is helpful, however, to consider poetry in terms of its etymology: from Greek ‘poiein’, ‘to create, to generate’. In this sense we can think of ‘the poetic’ as the ability to create new forms of meaning, just as the composition of classical music has changed over time, thriving on methods that were deemed unthinkable in the past. One of the poetic strengths of prose is that it can play off its innocuous, ‘prosaic’ aspect to develop a musicality and a rhythm of its own, while developing striking rhetorical effects to take the reader by surprise later on.

From Anne Carson, a contemporary master of the genre: ‘ Who is Cassandra? For a dime she will tell you that the swimming pool is full of blood. Like spacetime, she is nonlinear, narrative, and the most beautiful of Priam’s daughters according to Homer who says that when she stood up to prophesy she shone like a lamp in a bomb shelter.’