what is prose or essay

Definition of Prose

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

Common Examples of First Prose Lines in Well-Known Novels

The first prose line of a novel is significant for the writer and reader. This opening allows the writer to grab the attention of the reader, set the tone and style of the work, and establish elements of setting , character, point of view , and/or plot . For the reader, the first prose line of a novel can be memorable and inspire them to continue reading. Here are some common examples of first prose lines in well-known novels:

Examples of Famous Lines of Prose

Prose is a powerful literary device in that certain lines in literary works can have a great effect on readers in revealing human truths or resonating as art through language. Well-crafted, memorable prose evokes thought and feeling in readers. Here are some examples of famous lines of prose:

Types of Prose

Difference between prose and poetry.

Many people consider prose and poetry to be opposites as literary devices . While that’s not quite the case, there are significant differences between them. Prose typically features natural patterns of speech and communication with grammatical structure in the form of sentences and paragraphs that continue across the lines of a page rather than breaking. In most instances, prose features everyday language.

Writing a Prose Poem

Prose edda vs. poetic edda, examples of prose in literature, example 1: the grapes of wrath by john steinbeck.

A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.

Example 2: This Is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams

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

Example 3: Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Synonyms of Prose

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What is Prose? Definition, Examples of Prose

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Definition of prose: Prose is often defined as straightforward rather than poetic writing.

What is Prose?

When identifying a piece of writing as prose, the piece should be written in a typical, straightforward manner. It will follow grammatical structures rather than a meter or verse pattern.

Examples of Prose in Writing

Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City , is a work of nonfiction that utilizes prose when describing the effect the fair had on the local hospitals:

• “With so many people packed among the steam engines, giant rotating wheels, horse-drawn fire trucks, and rocketing bobsleds, the fair’s ambulances superintended by a doctor named Gentles were constantly delivering bruised, bloody, and overheated visitors to the exposition hospital.”

Mark Haddon also writes using prose in his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time when his teenaged protagonist finds his neighbor’s murdered dog:

• “It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’s house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead.”

Different Types of Prose

While prose can be broadly defined as straightforward writing that resembles everyday spoken word, there are categories that prose can be broken into: nonfiction, fictional, heroic, and poetry.

Nonfictional prose writings are pieces that are written that contain mostly facts but may contain pieces of fictional information for literary purposes. Many memoirs can be described as nonfictional prose because the writers often include fictional information to make their life stories more interesting for the readers.

Fictional prose is writing that is entirely made up by the authors such as in short stories or in novels. These are pieces such as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series or Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

Heroic prose pieces are written or oral stories that follow the traditional structure used by oral expressionists such as Homer’s The Illiad and The Odyssey . Both of these pieces include such structures as an invocation to the Muses or epithets that are used in oral storytelling.

Prose in poetry refers to works that include large amounts of poetic devices such as imagery, alliteration, and rhythm but are still written in a straightforward manner rather than in verse form.

The Function of Prose

Prose is used when the writer wants to tell a story in a straightforward manner. It should be used when the writer wants their writing to resemble everyday speech.

Examples of Prose in Literature

Here are some examples of prose in literature:

Nonfictional prose can be found in Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road because the piece is told in a straightforward manner:

• “I was born in a Negro town. I do not mean by that the black back-side of an average town. Eatonville, Florida, is, and was at the time of my birth, a pure Negro town—charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all.”

Fictional prose is used in John Kennedy Toole’s only novel A Confederacy of Dunces :

• “ Ignatius himself was dressed comfortably and sensibly. The hunting cap prevented head colds. The voluminous tweed trousers were durable and permitted unusually free locomotion.”

Dramatic prose can be found in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare often uses prose in this play when servants talk to show their lack of education and has higher-class characters talk in verse form. Here a servant speaks:

• “Now I’ll tell you without asking: my master is the great rich Capulet; and if you be not of the house of Montagues, I pray, come and crush a cup of wine. Rest you merry!”

Define prose: Prose is writing that resembles everyday speech. It is straightforward, ordinary language rather than following a meter or rhythmic pattern like poetry.

Final example of prose:

Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem is written using the ordinary language found in prose:

• “It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil.”

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How to Write the AP Lit Prose Essay + Example

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What is the ap lit prose essay, how will ap scores affect my college chances.

AP Literature and Composition (AP Lit), not to be confused with AP English Language and Composition (AP Lang), teaches students how to develop the ability to critically read and analyze literary texts. These texts include poetry, prose, and drama. Analysis is an essential component of this course and critical for the educational development of all students when it comes to college preparation. In this course, you can expect to see an added difficulty of texts and concepts, similar to the material one would see in a college literature course.

While not as popular as AP Lang, over 380,136 students took the class in 2019. However, the course is significantly more challenging, with only 49.7% of students receiving a score of three or higher on the exam. A staggeringly low 6.2% of students received a five on the exam. 

The AP Lit exam is similar to the AP Lang exam in format, but covers different subject areas. The first section is multiple-choice questions based on five short passages. There are 55 questions to be answered in 1 hour. The passages will include at least two prose fiction passages and two poetry passages and will account for 45% of your total score. All possible answer choices can be found within the text, so you don’t need to come into the exam with prior knowledge of the passages to understand the work. 

The second section contains three free-response essays to be finished in under two hours. This section accounts for 55% of the final score and includes three essay questions: the poetry analysis essay, the prose analysis essay, and the thematic analysis essay. Typically, a five-paragraph format will suffice for this type of writing. These essays are scored holistically from one to six points.

Today we will take a look at the AP Lit prose essay and discuss tips and tricks to master this section of the exam. We will also provide an example of a well-written essay for review.  

The AP Lit prose essay is the second of the three essays included in the free-response section of the AP Lit exam, lasting around 40 minutes in total. A prose passage of approximately 500 to 700 words and a prompt will be given to guide your analytical essay. Worth about 18% of your total grade, the essay will be graded out of six points depending on the quality of your thesis (0-1 points), evidence and commentary (0-4 points), and sophistication (0-1 points). 

While this exam seems extremely overwhelming, considering there are a total of three free-response essays to complete, with proper time management and practiced skills, this essay is manageable and straightforward. In order to enhance the time management aspect of the test to the best of your ability, it is essential to understand the following six key concepts.

1. Have a Clear Understanding of the Prompt and the Passage

Since the prose essay is testing your ability to analyze literature and construct an evidence-based argument, the most important thing you can do is make sure you understand the passage. That being said, you only have about 40 minutes for the whole essay so you can’t spend too much time reading the passage. Allot yourself 5-7 minutes to read the prompt and the passage and then another 3-5 minutes to plan your response.

As you read through the prompt and text, highlight, circle, and markup anything that stands out to you. Specifically, try to find lines in the passage that could bolster your argument since you will need to include in-text citations from the passage in your essay. Even if you don’t know exactly what your argument might be, it’s still helpful to have a variety of quotes to use depending on what direction you take your essay, so take note of whatever strikes you as important. Taking the time to annotate as you read will save you a lot of time later on because you won’t need to reread the passage to find examples when you are in the middle of writing. 

Once you have a good grasp on the passage and a solid array of quotes to choose from, you should develop a rough outline of your essay. The prompt will provide 4-5 bullets that remind you of what to include in your essay, so you can use these to structure your outline. Start with a thesis, come up with 2-3 concrete claims to support your thesis, back up each claim with 1-2 pieces of evidence from the text, and write a brief explanation of how the evidence supports the claim.

2. Start with a Brief Introduction that Includes a Clear Thesis Statement

Having a strong thesis can help you stay focused and avoid tangents while writing. By deciding the relevant information you want to hit upon in your essay up front, you can prevent wasting precious time later on. Clear theses are also important for the reader because they direct their focus to your essential arguments. 

In other words, it’s important to make the introduction brief and compact so your thesis statement shines through. The introduction should include details from the passage, like the author and title, but don’t waste too much time with extraneous details. Get to the heart of your essay as quick as possible. 

3. Use Clear Examples to Support Your Argument 

One of the requirements AP Lit readers are looking for is your use of evidence. In order to satisfy this aspect of the rubric, you should make sure each body paragraph has at least 1-2 pieces of evidence, directly from the text, that relate to the claim that paragraph is making. Since the prose essay tests your ability to recognize and analyze literary elements and techniques, it’s often better to include smaller quotes. For example, when writing about the author’s use of imagery or diction you might pick out specific words and quote each word separately rather than quoting a large block of text. Smaller quotes clarify exactly what stood out to you so your reader can better understand what are you saying.

Including smaller quotes also allows you to include more evidence in your essay. Be careful though—having more quotes is not necessarily better! You will showcase your strength as a writer not by the number of quotes you manage to jam into a paragraph, but by the relevance of the quotes to your argument and explanation you provide.  If the details don’t connect, they are merely just strings of details.

4. Discussion is Crucial to Connect Your Evidence to Your Argument 

As the previous tip explained, citing phrases and words from the passage won’t get you anywhere if you don’t provide an explanation as to how your examples support the claim you are making. After each new piece of evidence is introduced, you should have a sentence or two that explains the significance of this quote to the piece as a whole.

This part of the paragraph is the “So what?” You’ve already stated the point you are trying to get across in the topic sentence and shared the examples from the text, so now show the reader why or how this quote demonstrates an effective use of a literary technique by the author. Sometimes students can get bogged down by the discussion and lose sight of the point they are trying to make. If this happens to you while writing, take a step back and ask yourself “Why did I include this quote? What does it contribute to the piece as a whole?” Write down your answer and you will be good to go. 

5. Write a Brief Conclusion

While the critical part of the essay is to provide a substantive, organized, and clear argument throughout the body paragraphs, a conclusion provides a satisfying ending to the essay and the last opportunity to drive home your argument. If you run out of time for a conclusion because of extra time spent in the preceding paragraphs, do not worry, as that is not fatal to your score. 

Without repeating your thesis statement word for word, find a way to return to the thesis statement by summing up your main points. This recap reinforces the arguments stated in the previous paragraphs, while all of the preceding paragraphs successfully proved the thesis statement.

6. Don’t Forget About Your Grammar

Though you will undoubtedly be pressed for time, it’s still important your essay is well-written with correct punctuating and spelling. Many students are able to write a strong thesis and include good evidence and commentary, but the final point on the rubric is for sophistication. This criteria is more holistic than the former ones which means you should have elevated thoughts and writing—no grammatical errors. While a lack of grammatical mistakes alone won’t earn you the sophistication point, it will leave the reader with a more favorable impression of you. 

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Here are Nine Must-have Tips and Tricks to Get a Good Score on the Prose Essay:

• Carefully read, review, and underline key instruction s in the prompt.
• Briefly outlin e what you want to cover in your essay.
• Be sure to have a clear thesis that includes the terms mentioned in the instructions, literary devices, tone, and meaning.
• Include the author’s name and title  in your introduction. Refer to characters by name.
• Quality over quantity when it comes to picking quotes! Better to have a smaller number of more detailed quotes than a large amount of vague ones.
• Fully explain how each piece of evidence supports your thesis .  
• Focus on the literary techniques in the passage and avoid summarizing the plot. 
• Use transitions to connect sentences and paragraphs.
• Keep your introduction and conclusion short, and don’t repeat your thesis verbatim in your conclusion.

Here is an example essay from 2020 that received a perfect 6:

[1] In this passage from a 1912 novel, the narrator wistfully details his childhood crush on a girl violinist. Through a motif of the allure of musical instruments, and abundant sensory details that summon a vivid image of the event of their meeting, the reader can infer that the narrator was utterly enraptured by his obsession in the moment, and upon later reflection cannot help but feel a combination of amusement and a resummoning of the moment’s passion. 

[2] The overwhelming abundance of hyper-specific sensory details reveals to the reader that meeting his crush must have been an intensely powerful experience to create such a vivid memory. The narrator can picture the “half-dim church”, can hear the “clear wail” of the girl’s violin, can see “her eyes almost closing”, can smell a “faint but distinct fragrance.” Clearly, this moment of discovery was very impactful on the boy, because even later he can remember the experience in minute detail. However, these details may also not be entirely faithful to the original experience; they all possess a somewhat mysterious quality that shows how the narrator may be employing hyperbole to accentuate the girl’s allure. The church is “half-dim”, the eyes “almost closing” – all the details are held within an ethereal state of halfway, which also serves to emphasize that this is all told through memory. The first paragraph also introduces the central conciet of music. The narrator was drawn to the “tones she called forth” from her violin and wanted desperately to play her “accompaniment.” This serves the double role of sensory imagery (with the added effect of music being a powerful aural image) and metaphor, as the accompaniment stands in for the narrator’s true desire to be coupled with his newfound crush. The musical juxtaposition between the “heaving tremor of the organ” and the “clear wail” of her violin serves to further accentuate how the narrator percieved the girl as above all other things, as high as an angel. Clearly, the memory of his meeting his crush is a powerful one that left an indelible impact on the narrator. 

[3] Upon reflecting on this memory and the period of obsession that followed, the narrator cannot help but feel amused at the lengths to which his younger self would go; this is communicated to the reader with some playful irony and bemused yet earnest tone. The narrator claims to have made his “first and last attempts at poetry” in devotion to his crush, and jokes that he did not know to be “ashamed” at the quality of his poetry. This playful tone pokes fun at his childhood self for being an inexperienced poet, yet also acknowledges the very real passion that the poetry stemmed from. The narrator goes on to mention his “successful” endeavor to conceal his crush from his friends and the girl; this holds an ironic tone because the narrator immediately admits that his attempts to hide it were ill-fated and all parties were very aware of his feelings. The narrator also recalls his younger self jumping to hyperbolic extremes when imagining what he would do if betrayed by his love, calling her a “heartless jade” to ironically play along with the memory. Despite all this irony, the narrator does also truly comprehend the depths of his past self’s infatuation and finds it moving. The narrator begins the second paragraph with a sentence that moves urgently, emphasizing the myriad ways the boy was obsessed. He also remarks, somewhat wistfully, that the experience of having this crush “moved [him] to a degree which now [he] can hardly think of as possible.” Clearly, upon reflection the narrator feels a combination of amusement at the silliness of his former self and wistful respect for the emotion that the crush stirred within him. 

[4] In this passage, the narrator has a multifaceted emotional response while remembering an experience that was very impactful on him. The meaning of the work is that when we look back on our memories (especially those of intense passion), added perspective can modify or augment how those experiences make us feel

More essay examples, score sheets, and commentaries can be found at College Board .

While AP Scores help to boost your weighted GPA, or give you the option to get college credit, AP Scores don’t have a strong effect on your admissions chances . However, colleges can still see your self-reported scores, so you might not want to automatically send scores to colleges if they are lower than a 3. That being said, admissions officers care far more about your grade in an AP class than your score on the exam.

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What Is Prose?

The Quick Answer

Table of Contents

The Difference between Prose and Poetry

The difference between prose and prosaic writing, examples of prose, why prose is important.

• I'm not lying when I say a dog is full of love. I know from experience that a wet dog loves you the most.
• The truth I do not stretch or shove When I state the dog is full of love. I've also proved, by actual test, A wet dog is the lovingest. (US poet Ogden Nash)

Anastrophe (deliberately using the wrong word order)

• A stare long and threatening

Assonance (repeating vowel sounds in nearby words)

• The concept of mothering more overtly

Consonance (repeating consonant sounds in nearby words)

• Pick a lock and crack it.

Deliberate repetition (deliberately repeating ideas or words)

• I shall tell you, and you shall listen, and we shall agree.

Euphemisms (using agreeable words to replace offensive ones)

• He was so well oiled he lost his lunch .

Logosglyphs (using words that look like what they represent)

• With eyes like pools

Metaphors (saying something is something else)

• The volcano spewed its flaming Earth sauce .

Onomatopoeia (using words that sound like what they represent)

• Don't growl at customers.

Oxymoron (using contradictory terms)

• Non-prosaic prose

Similes (describing something as being like something else)

• The British accepted her absence like Americans accept the missing full stop in "Dr Pepper".
• Use literary devices to create non-prosaic prose.
• Flair in prose is like salt in soup. None is usually fine. A little is often an improvement. A lot is always a disaster.

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Definition of prose

 (Entry 1 of 4)

Definition of prose  (Entry 2 of 4)

Definition of prose  (Entry 3 of 4)

intransitive verb

Definition of pro se  (Entry 4 of 4)

Examples of prose in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'prose.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Noun, Adjective, and Verb

Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin prosa , from feminine of prorsus, prosus , straightforward, being in prose, contraction of proversus , past participle of provertere to turn forward, from pro- forward + vertere to turn — more at pro- , worth

Adjective or adverb

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Adjective Or Adverb

1861, in the meaning defined above

Phrases Containing prose

• polyphonic prose

Articles Related to prose

Poetic Forms: 13 Ways of Looking at a...

Poetic Forms: 13 Ways of Looking at a Poem

Sestina, anyone?

Dictionary Entries Near prose

Cite this entry.

“Prose.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prose. Accessed 14 Aug. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of prose, legal definition, legal definition of pro se.

Adverb or adjective

More from Merriam-Webster on prose

Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for prose

Nglish: Translation of prose for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of prose for Arabic Speakers

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What is Prose? Definition, Examples of Literary Prose

Prose is a form of written language that does not have a formal meter structure. Prose more closely mimics normal patterns of speech.

What is Prose?

Prose is a style of writing that does not follow a strict structure of rhyming and/or meter. Prose uses normal grammatical structures. Elements of prose writing include regular grammar and paragraph structures that organize ideas, forgoing more stylistic and aesthetic forms of writing found in poetry and lyrics.

Prose can include normal dialogue, speeches, novels, news reports, etc. Prose is distinguished from poetry which uses line breaks and has meter that tends to defy normal grammar rules.

In today’s literature, most stories are told in prose. There is no longer much emphasis on the oral tradition of storytelling, to which verse was very well suited. Since print came to be commonplace, storytellers tend to rely on prose to tell their stories because of the freedom it allows.

Different Types of Prose

There are different genres of writing that use prose style. Here are a few:

Nonfiction Prose

Nonfiction is a work of writing that is based on fact. Examples of nonfiction include memoirs, essays, instructions, biographies, etc.

Fiction Prose

Fiction is a genre of writing that is imagined or untrue. Novels use prose in order to tell stories. Subgenres of fiction can include fantasy, historical fiction, science fiction, etc.

Heroic Prose

Heroic prose uses the hero archetype in order to tell stories of bravery and travel in which good triumphs over evil. These stories are meant to be recited orally. Heroic prose may use tricks such as rhyme and a slight rhythmic structure in order to enhance the effects of being read out loud but are not the same as the ancient hero tales which were written in strict poetic verse.

Prose Poetry

Prose poetry uses certain poetic qualities in order to add a lyrical or aesthetic value to the writing. However, it stops short of any regular or strict metered form. This style of writing creates bolder emotional effects and often relies on metaphors and imagery in order to create similar reactions in readers that poetry would, while still maintaining the prose style.

The Function of Prose

Prose provides a loose structure for writers which offers freedom and creativity in expression. With prose, a writer can be as imaginative and creative as they want—or they can write very dryly in order to convey a specific point. It all comes down to the writer’s purpose and intended effect. With prose, the sky is the limit.

Ultimately, prose is an efficient way to write and convey ideas. There is a reason why news reporters and journalists write in prose—they can clearly express details, key facts, and updates in a way that is accessible to all. If everything was written in poetry/verse, there might be some conflicts in how news and important messages were spread.

Examples of Prose in Literature

In fiction, prose can be manipulated in order to create very specific stylistic effects. For example, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights tends to use long, winding sentence structures in order to convey the tendency to become obsessive, which is a trait found in several characters.

This writing, however, was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small—Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton. In vapid listlessness I leant my head against the window, and continued spelling over Catherine Earnshaw—Heathcliff—Linton, till my eyes closed; but they had not rested five minutes when a glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as spectres—the air swarmed with Catherines; and rousing myself to dispel the obtrustive name, I discovered my candle wick reclining on one of the antique volumes, and perfuming the place with an odour of roasted calf-skin.

Speeches are another place where prose is used to convey ideas. Consider the “No Easy Walk to Freedom” Speech by Nelson Mandela :

You can see that there is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow again and again before we reach the mountain tops of our desires.

Essays are also written in prose. The philosopher Sir Francis Bacon , who influenced founders of the American colonies, wrote the essay “On Nobility” in which he speaks on nobility in government.

For nobility attempers sovereignty, and draws the eyes of the people, somewhat aside from the line royal. But for democracies, they need it not; and they are commonly more quiet, and less subject to sedition, than where there are stirps of nobles. For men’s eyes are upon the business, and not upon the persons; or if upon the persons, it is for the business’ sake, as fittest, and not for flags and pedigree.

Recap: What is Prose in Literature?

Prose is the style of writing that does not use a metered format like poetry does. It more closely resembles normal patterns of speech, with normal grammatical structures such as full sentences and paragraphs.

Prose Meaning: Here’s What It Means and How To Use It

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We use prose every day. We read it, write it, and speak in it. 

Prose is simply a way to put language into words, sentences, and paragraphs. But while prose may feel like the most common form of writing we encounter (all of this is prose right here!), many different forms of prose have existed for centuries. 

In this article, we’ll look at what exactly makes something prose, how poems differ from prose, and some examples of the many styles there are for writing in prose! 

Prose is one of the world’s most important kinds of writing, and learning how to identify it is essential — this is how! 

What Is the Definition of Prose? 

In the English Language, Prose(prəʊz, proʊz, prōz) is the ordinary form of language, as opposed to verse, which is the elevated form. 

Prose is a general term for writing that is not poetry. It includes journalism, essays, fiction, and nonfiction writing. Prose is the bedrock of language and writing. It’s ordinary language and writing, a type of literature, a type of poetry, and a type of oratio (a speech).

In general, prose is a collection of non-poetic language used to communicate ideas and feelings that don’t fit into more formal categories. It can include everything from informal writing like emails and text messages to more traditional works like novels, short stories, essays, and poems. 

Prose vs. Verse

This type of writing is often distinguished from verse because it doesn’t have a regular meter or rhyme scheme (though some prose may contain these). Instead, it uses grammatically correct ways that follow natural patterns of speech.

Prose can also be used in everyday conversation or language that isn’t poetic—it’s an informal way of speaking or writing (that’s why we’re using it here). 

The main difference between poetry and prose is that poems have certain features: they’re metrical (the pattern of syllables per line), they use figurative language (images), they’re structured sonically (the sound effects), and they tend toward brevity—but not always! 

Sometimes, you can even find something called prose poetry, combining elements from both poetry and prosaic writing into one cohesive piece.

What Are Some Synonyms for Prose?

If you look in a thesaurus for word lists of synonyms for the word prose, you would likely find words including: 

• Composition

What Is Prose Poetry? 

Prose poetry is a form of poetry that uses the structure and syntax of prose. 

Prose poetry does not use rhyme or regular meter, which makes it difficult to tell the difference between prose poetry and prose. However, by looking at the lines individually and seeing whether or not they have a sense of closure or finality (a line break or period), you can determine if it’s prose or not. 

It is also worth noting that there are no hard-and-fast rules about what constitutes this genre. Some people consider any poem with broken line breaks to be a prose poem; others say only those written like an essay qualify as such; still, others say all free verse poems are examples of this form—the list goes on! 

In short: there isn’t just one type of free verse poem out there, so don’t feel bad if yours doesn’t fit into someone else’s definition exactly!

What Makes Prose Poetry Special?

This prose style is one of the most exciting examples of prose simply because it is free from any explicit rules. Any and all literary devices, stanzas, metrical structures, and grammatical construction can be used, which is why many prose writers and storytellers commonly use this. 

What Are the Different Forms of Prose? 

There are many different types of prose worldwide, with examples in virtually every language, from Middle English to Old French to Modern Arabic and Spanish. This is based on the fact that prose fiction and nonfictional prose writing are structured like everyday speech. They are stated in a very matter-of-fact way, which makes it very natural to understand. 

Creating prose that can honestly sound exciting and dynamic requires lots of practice and effort, simply because there aren’t any rules to draw color and excitement out of the writing by nature. 

What Is the Etymology of the Word Prose? 

The word prose is based on Latin, specifically in the Latin prōsa or prōsus , which means “straightforward” or “direct.” This is because the prose is designed to be very ordinary and direct in how it is written, without any excess focus on meters or special poetic rules. 

Knowing and understanding this linguistic origin can help you to remember the overt meaning of prose — everyday speech that is clear and easy to understand. While prose is free to take advantage of any metaphors and literary devices that the writer desires, it is not required to. 

We hope you enjoyed learning about prose with us! We’ve covered everything from the structure of prose to its history in literature, as well as different types of prose and how to identify them. By now, you should have a good understanding of what prose means, so there’s no excuse for not including some excellent prose in your following essay or story. 

Our blog posts , essays, and articles are researched and written by experienced professionals and academics who have the drive to spread their knowledge on effective communication techniques. 

Whether you are writing a resume for college or your latest novel, there are ways to express yourself in a way that will resonate deeply with your audience. We help you develop your best practices in writing and communicating so that you can bring new and exciting things to the table — no matter what the situation! 

If you want to become a master of writing prose for yourself, check out our latest blog posts on The Word Counter right here ! 

Sources: 

Prose Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com

Prose – Definition, Meaning & Synonyms | Vocabulary.com

Prose definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary

Kevin Miller is a growth marketer with an extensive background in Search Engine Optimization, paid acquisition and email marketing. He is also an online editor and writer based out of Los Angeles, CA. He studied at Georgetown University, worked at Google and became infatuated with English Grammar and for years has been diving into the language, demystifying the do's and don'ts for all who share the same passion! He can be found online here.

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What is Prose — Definition and Examples in Literature

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P rose can be a rather general literary term that many use to describe all types of writing. However, prose by definition pertains to specific qualities of writing that we will dive into in this article. What is the difference between prose and poetry and what is prose used for? Let’s define this essential literary concept and look at some examples to find out.

What is Prose in Literature?

First, let’s define prose.

Prose is used in various ways for various purposes. It's a concept you need to understand if your goal to master the literary form. Before we dive in, it’s important to understand the prose definition and how it is distinguished from other styles of writing. 

PROSE DEFINITION

What is prose.

In writing, prose is a style used that does not follow a structure of rhyming or meter. Rather, prose follows a grammatical structure using words to compose phrases that are arranged into sentences and paragraphs. It is used to directly communicate concepts, ideas, and stories to a reader. Prose follows an almost naturally verbal flow of writing that is most common among fictional and non-fictional literature such as novels, magazines, and journals.

Four types of prose:

Nonfictional prose, fictional prose, prose poetry, heroic prose, prose meaning , prose vs poetry.

To better understand prose, it’s important to understand what structures it does not follow which would be the structure of poetry. Let’s analyze the difference between prose vs poetry.

Poetry follows a specific rhyme and metric structure. These are often lines and stanzas within a poem. Poetry also utilizes more figurative and often ambiguous language that purposefully leaves room for the readers’ analysis and interpretation.

Finally, poetry plays with space on a page. Intentional line breaks, negative space, and varying line lengths make poetry a more aesthetic form of writing than prose. 

Take, for example, the structure of this [Why] by E.E. Cummings. Observe his use of space and aesthetics as well as metric structure in the poem. 

E.E. Cummings Poem

E.E. Cummings may be one of the more stylish poets when it comes to use of page space. But poetry is difference in structure and practice than prose. 

Prose follows a structure that makes use of sentences, phrases, and paragraphs. This type of writing follows a flow more similar to verbal speech and communication. This makes it the best style of writing to clearly articulate and communicate concepts, events, stories, and ideas as opposed to the figurative style of poetry.

What is Prose in Literature? 

Take, for example, the opening paragraph of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye . We can tell immediately the prose is written in a direct, literal way that also gives voice to our protagonist . 

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

From this example, you can see how the words flow more conversationally than poetry and is more direct with what information or meaning is being communicated. Now that you understand the difference between poetry, let’s look at the four types of prose.

Related Posts

• What is Litotes — Definition and Examples →
• Different Types of Poems and Poem Structures →
• What is Iambic Pentameter? Definition and Examples →

Prose Examples

Types of prose.

While all four types of prose adhere to the definition we established, writers use the writing style for different purposes. These varying purposes can be categorized into four different types.

Nonfictional prose is a body of writing that is based on factual and true events. The information is not created from a writer’s imagination, but rather true accounts of real events. 

This type can be found in newspapers, magazines, journals, biographies, and textbooks. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl , for example, is a work written in nonfictional style.

Unlike nonfictional, fictional prose is partly or wholly created from a writer’s imagination. The events, characters, and story are imagined such as Romeo and Juliet , The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , or Brave New World . This type is found as novels, short stories, or novellas .

Heroic prose is a work of writing that is meant to be recited and passed on through oral or written tradition. Legends, mythology, fables, and parables are examples of heroic prose that have been passed on over time in preservation. 

Finally, prose poetry is poetry that is expressed and written in prose form. This can be thought of almost as a hybrid of the two that can sometimes utilize rhythmic measures. This type of poetry often utilizes more figurative language but is usually written in paragraph form. 

An example of prose poetry is “Spring Day” by Amy Lowell. Lowell, an American poet, published this in 1916 and can be read almost as hyper short stories written in a prose poetry style. 

The first section can be read below: 

The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.

The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.

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. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots.

The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air."

While these four types of prose are varying ways writers choose to use it, let’s look at the functions of them to identify the strengths of the writing style. 

What Does Prose Mean in Writing

Function of prose in literature.

What is prose used for and when? Let’s say you want to tell a story, but you’re unsure if using prose or poetry would best tell your story.

To determine if the correct choice is prose, it’s important to understand the strengths of the writing style. 

Direct communication

Prose, unlike poetry, is often less figurative and ambiguous. This means that a writer can be more direct with the information they are trying to communicate. This can be especially useful in storytelling, both fiction and nonfiction, to efficiently fulfill the points of a plot.

Curate a voice

Because prose is written in the flow of verbal conversation, it’s incredibly effective at curating a specific voice for a character. Dialogue within novels and short stories benefit from this style.

Think about someone you know and how they talk. Odds are, much of their character and personality can be found in their voice.

When creating characters, prose enables a writer to curate the voice of that character. For example, one of the most iconic opening lines in literature informs us of what type of character we will be following.

Albert Camus’ The Stranger utilizes prose in first person to establish the voice of the story’s protagonist. 

“Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.”

Build rapport with the reader

Lastly, in addition to giving character’s a curated voice, prose builds rapport with the reader. The conversational tone allows readers to become familiar with a type of writing that connects them with the writer. 

A great example of this is Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels . As a nonfiction work written in prose, Thompson’s voice and style in the writing is distinct and demands a relationship with the reader.

Whether it is one of contradiction or agreement, the connection exists through the prose. It is a connection that makes a reader want to meet or talk with the writer once they finish their work. 

Prose is one of the most common writing styles for modern writers. But truly mastering it means understanding both its strengths and its shortcomings. 

Different Types of Poems

Curious about learning about the counterpart to prose? In our next article we dive in different types of poems as well as different types of poem structures. Check out the complete writer’s guide to poetry types up next. 

Up Next: Types of Poems →

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• Literary Terms
• When & How to Write a Prose
• Definition & Examples

How to Write Prose

There’s just one rule for writing prose: don’t write verse by mistake. If you grew up in the modern world, chances are you’ve been writing prose since the day you started stringing sentences together on a page. So all you have to do now is keep it up!

• In general, prose does not have line breaks; rather, it has complete sentences with periods or other punctuation marks.
• There’s another very important kind of line break that makes your prose easier to understand: paragraph breaks. Paragraphs break up your writing into manageable chunks that the reader can digest one at a time as they read. This is especially important in essays , where each paragraph contains a single “step” in the argument. Without paragraph breaks, prose becomes pretty ugly: just a huge block of words without any breaks or structure at all!

When to Use Prose

Unless you’re writing poetry, you’re writing prose. (Remember that prose has a negative definition.) As we saw in §2, essays use prose. This is mainly just a convention – it’s what readers are used to, so it’s what writers use. In the modern world, we generally find prose easier to read, so readers prefer to have essays written that way. The same thing is true for stories – we have an easier time following the story when it’s written in prose simply because it’s what we’re accustomed to.

So you can use prose pretty much anywhere – poetry is the only kind of writing that frequently uses verse, meaning prose covers everything else . And even poetry, as we’ve seen, can be written in prose. So when should you use prose? The answer is: all over the place.

List of Terms

• Alliteration
• Amplification
• Anachronism
• Anthropomorphism
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• APA Citation
• Aposiopesis
• Autobiography
• Bildungsroman
• Characterization
• Circumlocution
• Cliffhanger
• Comic Relief
• Connotation
• Deus ex machina
• Deuteragonist
• Doppelganger
• Double Entendre
• Dramatic irony
• Equivocation
• Extended Metaphor
• Figures of Speech
• Flash-forward
• Foreshadowing
• Intertextuality
• Juxtaposition
• Literary Device
• Malapropism
• Onomatopoeia
• Parallelism
• Pathetic Fallacy
• Personification
• Point of View
• Polysyndeton
• Protagonist
• Red Herring
• Rhetorical Device
• Rhetorical Question
• Science Fiction
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Synesthesia
• Turning Point
• Understatement
• Urban Legend
• Verisimilitude
• Essay Guide
• Cite This Website

Reading Worksheets, Spelling, Grammar, Comprehension, Lesson Plans

What is Prose?

Prose is ordinary language that follows regular grammatical conventions and does not contain a formal metrical structure. This definition of prose is an example of prose writing, as is most human conversation, textbooks, lectures, novels, short stories, fairy tales, newspaper articles, and essays.

Prose can be either fiction or non-fiction. It can be “poetic,” meaning that it has rhythmic structure and contains figurative language. Sermons, political speeches, and modernist writing are good examples of poetic fiction.

How Do you Identify Prose in Writing?

Distinguishing prose from poetry is usually just a matter of recognizing the basic conventions of prose writing: paragraphs and sentences that have proper grammar and mechanics. Poetry, on the other hand, contains lines and stanzas. And while there may be a cadence or rhythm to prose, it contains neither a regular meter nor a deliberate rhyme scheme.

Only one form of writing falls in a gray area, and that is the so-called “prose poem.” As the name suggests, prose poems contain a formal metrical structure but are written out like prose, in sentence and paragraph form.

Examples of Prose

Prose Example 1.  The Hunger Games,  by Suzanne Collins, is a prose novel.

Prose Example 2. “Cinderella” is a prose fairy tale.

Prose Example 3. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a prose story by Charlotte Gilman Perkins.

Prose Example 4. “The State of the Union Address” is a prose speech delivered early in the year by the sitting president of the United States.

Prose Example 5. “The Declaration of Independence” is a prose document signed by prominent American colonists who wished no longer to be under British rule.

(View all  literary devices )

Prose Type: What are 10 Different Prose Types in Creative Writing?

1. biography, 2. autobiography, 3. folktale.

• 6. Fable

9. Short Story

When discussing the eminent components of  literature , we do take into consideration the mode through which a piece of work is presented. While doing so, one gets introduced to terms like Prose and  Poetry  which later become the center of the talk. These are two such forms through which almost all of the literature encompass.

To elucidate and encounter the difference between the two, one can easily understand Prose as being the  writing  that we see in our daily lives that does not follow any metrical structure and is written in the form of sentences and paragraphs. Poetry, on the other hand, can be seen as a literary work that caters to aesthetics, follows a certain style and  rhythm , and is expressed in stanzas.

Continue reading this article to develop a deeper understanding of the 10 Prose type with  examples .

What is a Prose?

Prose can simply be defined as the form of writing which is specifically of pragmatic  nature , following a proper grammatical structure. Unlike Poetry it does not follow any fixed metrical parameters and is expressed in the form of sentences and paragraphs in a lucid manner. It often aims at conveying the message by following a  narrative  structure. Prose can be of various  types  like biography, folktale, autobiography,  fables , and many more. 10 of its types are discussed below.

A thorough description of a person’s life is referred to as his/her Biography.

It is a kind of prose that is full of basic information about all the highs and lows in a person’s life, including anecdotes and memoirs. A biography tells the tale of the person’s personal experiences with life,  relationships , work, and all other things. You are the major lead of your biography and it tells your truth to the world. Biographies fall under the category of non- fiction . When written in-depth, we know it as legacy writing.

A biography can also be portrayed or presented in various forms of media, from literature to film. An accredited biography can only be written with the permission, cooperation, and participation of the person or the person’s  family  or successors. It is the story of a person’s life narrated and drafted by him or her but perfected and written by another person.       

Biography Example:  The Life of Samuel Johnson (By James Boswell)

This is a perfect example of the  English   language . Boswell was well acquainted with Samuel Johnson and has created a masterpiece of biography for the late  writer  and the readers.

Autobiography is also a kind of prose and as the term suggests, it is the self-written account of one’s life.

It is very similar to a biography, except it is written by the same person whose story it is about. For example, if I write the story of my life by myself completely, then it will be referred to as an autobiography. The person can also seek guidance or help from another writer or hire a  ghostwriter  if required.

Autobiography Example:  The Story of My Life by Helen Keller is the best example of an autobiography as it captures it all and that too perfectly.

Folktale is a popular or legendary story, familiar to a specific group or culture reflecting their values and ideas. They are usually passed down verbally from one generation to another. These stories carry a moral or lesson to be absorbed by the audience. Folktales have many types like fables, tall tales, ghost stories, or religious tales.

Folktale Example:  The Pied Piper and The Frog King are popular folktales both impart valuable lessons. The Frog King is one of the oldest German folk tales. In the story, a princess promises a frog that she will make him her companion if he retrieves her favourite toy from the bottom of the deep  spring . The moral of The Frog King is that one should honour their promises and will be rewarded. The frog honoured his promise to retrieve the ball and the princess (unwillingly) honoured her promise to the frog. His curse was broken, and she got a fancy new husband.

Myth is a traditional story or tale full of symbols. These superficially relate to reality or actual events and are especially associated with religious beliefs and traditions. The key figures in myths are gods, demigods, or supernatural humans with unrealistic powers and talents entangled in extraordinary events or circumstances in an unknown period.

Myth Example:  Pandora’s Box is an artifact in  Greek mythology  connected with the myth of Pandora in Hesiod’s Works and Days.

Legend stories are a subgenre of folktales. The legend may be a traditional story or a group of stories with a sound message for the audience. Also, legends are about a person or a place. Earlier, the term Legend was used for telling a tale about a saint. These are quite similar to folktales in content. They may include supernatural beings, elements of mythology, or explanations of natural phenomena, but they are linked with a particular locality or person and are told as a matter of antiquity.

Legend Example:  Some well-known legends are

• The tales of Odysseus from Ancient Greece,
• Beowulf from the Norse lands,
• King Arthur from Old England,
• The famous Robin Hood,
• The  Bigfoot .

6 .  Fable

A fictional work of literature featuring inanimate objects or forces of nature,  animals ,  plants , or legendary creatures having humanlike attributes. A fable is written in prose or verse, to highlight human foolishness and flaws or mistakes. These have a moral or lesson weaved into the story and are often explicitly planned at the end as a concise maxim or saying.

Fable Example:  A splendid example is The Panchatantra, a Sanskrit compilation of beast fables. Animal Farm by George Orwell is an excellent novel depicting the situation of Russia post-war through animals in a satirical form.

A parable is a brief, educational story, written in the form of prose or verse, that explains one or more informative lessons or teachings. It differs from a fable as fables employ animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as key figures, whereas parables have human characters. A parable is a kind of metaphorical analogy. Parables in literature impart a moral lesson to the readers. It is excellent for teaching because stories are easier to recall with clarity and interest.

Prose Type Parable Example: “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” warns against lying because of its impending consequences.

A novel is a long literary fictional work, usually written in the form of prose. A novel is a book telling a single tale penned creatively with human experience and exposure. The novel has several chapters, each chapter is connected or linked to the other through a sequence of events and has a specific setting and tone. We have a large number of genres of novels available which have encompassed various styles and types, some of them are picaresque,  comedy ,  drama , romance, gothic, epistolary, and many more.

Prose Type Novel Example:  The  Harry Potter series  by J.K. Rowling.

As the name suggests, a short story is a fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel. A short story has only one or few events and passages, has few characters and few to no chapters. The form encourages conservation of setting, concise narrative, and the omission of a complex  plot ; character is disclosed in action and dramatic encounters but is seldom fully developed.

Prose Type Short Story Example:  “ A Christmas Carol ” by Charles Dickens and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson.

A piece of writing that lets the author present his/her ideas and feelings or argument. An essay doesn’t necessarily have to be formal or have a system to follow, it usually deals with its topic in a more personal manner, putting out its  point of view .

Some of the popular essays are :

• David Sedaris
• Kookaburra, 
• Zadie Smith – Fail Better
• Virginia Woolf – Death of the Moth.

Hope you enjoyed knowing about these prose types. Check out  9 genres of Poetry  to learn about different  poetry genres .

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The difference between prose and poetry seems easy to explain: one has blocks of text and fully-fleshed characters, the other has line breaks and pretty words. That’s it, right?

Despite their visual quirks, prose and poetry share many similarities: prose can be musical, poetry can have plots and characters, and both are millennia-old traditions. As such, it would be wrong to prescribe a rigid decision tree for writing prose vs. poetry—many writers have both in their toolkits, relying on each form to communicate different truths.

“Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.” —Jean-Paul Sartre

So what is the difference between poetry and prose? And which should you write for which occasions? Again, we won’t give hard-and-fast rules, but we can explore their differences in depth and discuss their possibilities.

First, we’ll discuss the features of prose and poetry independently, then we’ll loop back to examine both their differences and their areas of overlap.

Prose Vs. Poetry: Contents

Prose Versus Verse: Line Breaks

Prose is more functional than poetry, how to read prose, further readings in fiction and nonfiction, artistic definitions of poetry vary, poetry uses language richly, how to read poetry, further readings in poetry, poetry vs. prose: a clear example of each, 5 similar features of prose and poetry, 10 differences between prose and poetry, poetry vs. prose venn diagram, prose vs. poetry: a final note on literary binaries, prose vs. poetry: defining prose.

Prose is the more common writing form that everyone is comfortable reading and writing. This article relies on prose—as do most ( but not all! ) novels, and just about all news stories, instruction manuals, scientific papers, and so on.

The most straightforward rule of thumb for knowing that you’re reading prose (as opposed to its counterpart, verse ) is that there are no defined line breaks : words go all the way to the edge of the page without “turning back” early.

A rule of thumb for prose (as opposed to its counterpart, verse ) is that there are no defined line breaks.

Again, that’s how this blog article works, along with most other writing, from tweets to short stories to scientific papers.

So why would you stop writing prose, and move over to the with-line-breaks type of writing known as verse? The line breaks aren’t arbitrary, but reflect an underlying difference in how prose and verse tend to be structured. To quote the always-helpful Wikipedia:

“Where the common unit of verse is based on meter or rhyme, the common unit of prose is purely grammatical, such as a sentence or paragraph.”

So is verse (writing with line breaks) always poetry? While two are often used synonymously, defining poetry requires more than just scanning for line breaks: as we’ll discuss below, poetry is also about the rich and musical use of language.

Prose is not the counterpart of poetry, but the counterpart of verse.

So prose is not the counterpart of poetry, but rather the counterpart of verse. So verse is not what strictly defines poetry. In fact, not all poetry is in verse—specifically, prose poetry isn’t. In other words, prose and poetry do overlap, whereas prose and verse don’t.

Most poetry is in verse, but some poetry is in prose.

We go into more detail on line breaks, stanzas, and the use of page space in the sections below.

A helpful pattern in understanding prose vs. poetry is as follows: prose tends to work in clearer meanings, and to be less musical (that is, working with the inherent rhythms and sonic properties of language) and less densely packed with meanings, literary devices , and associations, than poetry.

As such, prose writing tends to be linear: while a prosaic sentence can twist and turn, it tends to share clear information, generally in a logical order.

Prose tends to work in clearer meanings, and to be less musical and dense, than poetry.

Again, exceptions exist, notably prose poetry : prose writing—writing with no line endings or defined rhythmic meter—that is highly musical and dense, and that is generally more impressionistic and multifaceted than most prose in the meanings it conveys.

And then there’s prose writing that is enigmatic and dreamlike rather than clear and orderly, such as the stream-of-consciousness prose writing in James Joyce’s Ulysses .

These exceptions prove the rule, though: most other prose, from this blog article your friend’s next Facebook post to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , tends to follow the delineation described here.

We’ll allow Hemingway a last word with a slightly macho, not-applicable-to-every-prose-work, but still helpful description of prose: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”

Sound good? To get a stronger feel for prose and further acquaint yourself with prose writing, take a look at the readings below.

This article gives close reading strategies for prose writing.

How to Read Prose: Close Reading Strategies for Prose Writers

The articles below outline helpful practices for numerous kinds of prose writing, from flash fiction to the novel, focusing especially on the common ingredients of storytelling .

• Crafting a Story Outline
• Freytag’s Pyramid
• Literary Devices in Prose
• Writing Flash Fiction
• Writing the Short Story
• Writing the Novella
• Writing the Novel

Prose vs. Poetry: Defining Poetry

Poetry is the oldest literary form, predating the written word (and therefore, prose) by several millennia. Up until the printing press revolutionized the distribution of literature, poetry was the main form for storytellers, who used meter and rhythm to perform oral retellings of their work.

So, what is poetry? As we’ve seen in our introduction to prose above, most—but not all—poetry is written in verse: writing with line breaks, organized around rhythm or meter rather than grammar. Still, we’ve also seen that verse is not what defines poetry, nor is all poetry based in verse.

So it’s not simply another word for verse. Is there an agreed-upon artistic definition of poetry as a literary form? (Spoiler: No.)

Artistic definitions of poetry change from poetic movement to poetic movement—and from poet to poet.

For example, William Wordsworth said that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings… recollected in tranquility.” This sentiment—largely reflective of the Romantic era—certainly rings true for some poetry. However, New Formalist poets work with poetry to distill and reflect emotion through form and meter: in other words, structure over emotion.

The point is, there’s no singular way to define or understand the artistic aims of poetry. Rather, all poets must define these aims for themselves and write accordingly.

Poets must define the artistic aims of poetry for themselves and write accordingly.

Learning about poetry requires familiarizing yourself with what other poets have already done. This list of poetry movements can jumpstart your understanding of poetry’s complex and various histories.

Good poetry, from any tradition, sings and resonates beyond the merely “prosaic.”

Whatever literary tradition you ascribe to, poetry has a clear job to be rich, musical, evocative. Good poetry, from any tradition, sings and resonates in a way that goes beyond the merely “prosaic,” as in the following poem excerpt by Derek Walcott:

You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart.

So poetry, in any tradition, is the “cheesecake of language”: packed to the brim with sonic and expressive power. In poetry, it’s not enough to make a rational point straightforwardly, like the prosaic sentence you’re reading is doing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge said this beautifully, and we can give him the last word in defining poetry.

“Poetry: the best words in the best order.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Cool, right? If you’d like to learn more, check out our guides for reading and understanding poetry.

This article gives close reading strategies for poetry writing.

How to Read Poetry Like a Poet

The articles below outline helpful practices poetry writing, including deep dives on common literary devices in poetry and established poetry forms.

• What is Poetry
• Poetry Forms
• Writing and Publishing a Poetry Book

Let’s cap the definitions of poetry and prose above by simply giving a clear example of each.

Here is some beautiful fiction writing that is definitely prose:

They were nearly born on a bus, Estha and Rahel. The car in which Baba, their father, was taking Ammu, their mother, to hospital in Shillong to have them, broke down on the winding tea-estate road in Assam. They abandoned the car and flagged down a crowded State Transport bus. With the queer compassion of the very poor for the comparatively well off, or perhaps only because they saw how hugely pregnant Ammu was, seated passengers made room for the couple, and for the rest of the journey Estha and Rahel’s father had to hold their mother’s stomach (with them in it) to prevent it from wobbling. That was before they were divorced and Ammu came back to live in Kerala.

—Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

And here is some writing that is definitely poetry:

We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

—Shakespeare, The Tempest

Having defined prose and poetry above, the reality is that they can be more similar than you might imagine. We’ll discuss their differences in a moment, but first, it’s important to understand the shared potential that each form holds:

• Musicality and rhythm
• Use of colloquial speech
• Use of literary devices
• Ability to tell stories
• Show, don’t tell

1. Musicality and Rhythm

It’s a common misconception that only poetry can be musical. While rhythm and meter are important aspects of a poem’s construction, musicality begins with language, not with structure.

An immediate example of “musical prose” is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Susan Bell, writer of The Artful Edit , argues that Gatsby finds its success precisely because of the story’s musical, elegant storytelling—certainly, the book has a charged poeticism that feels just as decadent and tasteful as the high society of the Roaring Twenties. Below is some undeniably musical prose:

2. Use of Literary Devices

Things are like other things, which is the essence of literary devices. While some devices are unique to each form—poems have enjambment, prose can begin in media res —a successful piece of writing requires literary devices .

3. Use of Colloquial Speech

Yes, some writing uses lofty and erudite language. However, contemporary prose and poetry writers, from all eras, recognize the importance of speaking to their audience.

Colloquial speech is one way of speaking to your audience. A colloquialism is a turn of phrase with a specific social and temporal context. For example, “groovy” belongs to the American 1970s, Victorian Brits called a brave person “bricky,” and Gen Z’ers “stan” on Twitter.

In literature, Jay Gatsby’s “old sport” is just as colloquial as the poem “A Study of Reading Habits ,” which uses phrases like “right hook” and “load of crap.”

4. Storytelling

Another common misconception is that poetry doesn’t tell stories. While fiction and nonfiction are the genres of prose, poetry also possesses a powerful narrative voice.

Singular poems can tell grand stories, especially poetry in antiquity. The Epic of Gilgamesh , The Odyssey , and Beowulf are all stories in verse, as are novel-poems like Autobiography of Red .

Additionally, contemporary poetry collections often tell stories, just with less linearity. Louise Gluck’s collection Wild Iris is told from the perspective of a flower, and as the seasons change, the flower observes the infinite singularity of mankind, God, and the Universe.

5. Show, Don’t Tell Writing

It’s important for storytellers to demonstrate their ideas without spoon feeding the reader. In other words, writers should Show instead of Tell.

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. —Anton Chekhov

We consider “Show, Don’t Tell” a golden rule of writing. Brush up on it here !

We’ve discussed their similarities, but the difference between poetry and prose is usually fairly clear in practice. The following ten items distinguish the two. To help demonstrate our point, we represent each form with a well known piece of literature. Poetry examples were pulled from Dylan Thomas’ “ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night ,” and prose examples come from “ The Cask of Amontillado ” by Edgar Allan Poe.

1. Prose vs. Poetry: Use of Page Space

In prose, a line of text begins and ends at the margins of the page. In poetry, the author uses shorter lines, broken before the page margins to introduce multiple meanings. Line breaks are an enduring feature of what differentiates prose and poetry, adding extra emphasis to certain words and sounds.

You’ll notice in prose that a partial line occurs only before a new paragraph.

In poetry, the line breaks mean something more intentional. The ending words can help uphold meter and rhyme schemes, and it also emphasizes important words: “night” and “light” are repeatedly pit against each other in Thomas’ villanelle .

2. Prose vs. Poetry: Paragraphs vs. Stanzas

Prose passages divide single ideas into sentences, and those sentences go on to form paragraphs. A new paragraph signifies the introduction of new ideas or the continuation of relevant information.

The equivalent of a paragraph in poetry is the stanza. Stanzas are groupings of lines which act as units of meaning, with different stanzas containing different ideas and images.

3. Prose vs. Poetry: Single vs. Multiple Meanings

In prose, the meaning of each word is usually straightforward, with double meanings (like puns and irony) clearly expressed. Most prose relies on clear meanings to deliver clear, linear messages.

By contrast, the language of poetry contains multitudes. One word can hold many different meanings, and ideas can be broken into both sentences and lines.

Take the line “old age should burn and rave at close of day.” The word rave can mean multiple things: it can mean to rant and rave as old people (stereotypically) do, or it can mean to rage and fight against. The pun here is intended to energize the reader,

4. Prose vs. Poetry: Noun-Verb Placements

In Standard English , which is the common (but not default) language of prose, nouns and verbs are found close to each other. This is a facet of “clear communication”—it’s important to know who is doing what as efficiently as possible.

We have bolded the noun-verb pairs in an excerpt from both the poem and prose piece.

Notice how the noun-verb pairs can stray from each other much more easily in poetry. Dylan Thomas inserts a noun-verb pair between a noun-verb pair in each stanza—which is much harder to use effectively in prose.

Notice that, in prose, a noun can have multiple verbs attached to it, but the first verb is almost always next to the noun.

5. Prose vs. Poetry: Rhyme (Sometimes)

There are two types of rhyme: internal and external rhyme. External rhyme occurs at the ends of lines, such as the many “-ight” words in Thomas’ poem.

Internal rhyme refers to words that rhyme with each other inside the same beat. These rhymes are not always intentional or charged with meaning, but they occur, such as in this sentence from Poe’s story:

“We had passed through walls of piled bones , with casks and puncheons intermingling, into the inmost recesses of the catacombs.”

Bones and catacombs aptly rhyme with each other. Note, rhyme is not a necessary feature of any prose and many poems. Though some poetry forms do require rhyme schemes, contemporary poets tend to eschew rhyming.

6. Prose vs. Poetry: Meter (Sometimes)

Like rhyme, meter is an (often) optional component of poetry writing. Meter refers to the stress patterns of syllables and the number of syllables per line. Well-executed meter can give poetry a certain musical quality.

Thomas’ poem is written in iambic pentameter, a requirement of the traditional villanelle form. This means there are 10 syllables in each line, following an unstressed-stressed pattern. To understand syllable stress, read Thomas’ poem out loud, and note how every second syllable is emphasized harder than the first.

Prose does not rely on meter to tell a story.

Prose does not have any metrical requirements, and thank goodness for that. Meter can be extraordinarily tough to impose on a poem, but it also affects how the reader interprets the piece. However, prose does not rely on meter to tell a story, as these poetry devices often instill multiple meanings in a piece.

7. Prose vs. Poetry: Pragmatic vs. Imaginative Focus

On a macro-level, the vision of poets and prose writers tends to differ. Prose has a pragmatic focus, meaning that each word should clearly advance a specific idea or narrative. The focus of prose is storytelling, so the author has a duty to use words diligently.

While poetry can tell stories, a poem rarely focuses on plot points, settings, and characters.

While poetry can tell stories, a poem rarely focuses on plot points, settings, and characters. Rather, poetry has an imaginative focus. Words are allowed to break their conventional bounds in the goal of expressing emotions, and ideas can stack upon each other like grains of sand in a sand castle.

So, what’s pragmatic about Poe, and what’s imaginative about Thomas? Every word in Poe’s piece describes details and events that push the reader towards the climax. At no point does the reader jump out of the narrative to speculate or stargaze.

In Thomas’ poem, the words don’t point the reader towards a specific event, but they do encourage the reader to think deeply about abstract ideas. Old or young, the reader will contend with ideas of life, death, justice, goodness, and the judgment against our souls. In 19 lines of mostly concrete images, the poet asks us to read imaginatively—and in the process, to learn what we believe.

8. Prose vs. Poetry: Paraphrasability

A piece of prose can be summarized. If you ask “what is ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ about?”, it is possible to paraphrase the story and get the gist of its deeper meaning. In short, Poe’s story observes a man desperate for revenge, only to find that revenge often hurts both the punisher and the punished.

Poetry is generally harder to summarize than prose, because it tends to include greater multiplicities of meaning.

Poetry is generally harder to summarize than prose, because it tends to include greater multiplicities of meaning. No one can tell you what a certain poem means. They can tell you what it isn’t —for example, “Do Not Go Gentle” is not about heartbreak, war, or the summertime—but deciding what a poem means requires a reader’s own attention.

For example, one could summarize Thomas’ poem as “an ode to Thomas’ dying father, with a vengeful bent against mankind’s eventual death.” But, does saying that invoke Thomas’ juxtaposition of light and dark? His use of rhyme to draw a conceit? His need to believe in the transience of the soul? By the time you’ve summarized the poem, you’ve written something as long as the poem itself. Poetry cannot be paraphrased.

9. Prose vs. Poetry: Point of View

Prose and poetry treat “point of view” in very different ways. A point of view (POV) refers to who is telling the story. The storyteller doesn’t always have a name or a face, but they do inevitably change how a story is read.

In prose, there are 4 main POVs:

• First Person (I): The story is told in the first person, from a character who is either the protagonist or adjacent to the protagonist. The Cask of Amontillado uses the first person POV.
• Second Person (You): The story is told in the second person. Often, the writer will substitute “the protagonist” for “you,” making the story’s actions feel more intimate and personal. Second Person storytelling is rare, but not unheard of.
• Third Person Limited (He/She/They): The story is told in the third person, and it focuses on the perspective of the protagonist. We have access to most of their thoughts and feelings, but our access to other people is limited by the protagonist’s perspective. Sometimes, writers combine this with the intimacy of 1st person narration, in a technique called free indirect discourse .
• Third Person Omniscient (He/She/They): The story is told in the third person, and the narrator has access to everyone’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. We can jump from person to person with ease, interweaving webs of complex narratives together.

Some stories will also take a Third Person Mixed approach, meaning the meat of the story is told from the protagonist’s perspective, but the reader occasionally jumps to someone else’s POV or to a historical time period.

While poetry can use the same pronouns (I/You/He/She/They), it uses POV differently. A poem is always told from the perspective of “the speaker.” The speaker can be the poet themselves—Dylan Thomas is certainly the voice behind his poem, and he is certainly talking to his father. However, the correct approach is to always call the poem’s POV “the speaker,” as a poem can inhibit many different voices at once. Finally, poetry is much easier to apply to yourself when the speaker isn’t anyone in particular.

10. Prose vs. Poetry: Concision

Prose and poetry writers should both write concisely. Concise writing eschews redundancies and makes every word count. However, concision means something different for the two forms.

In prose, concision generally means that not a word is wasted in conveying information. Concise prose expresses its meaning clearly.

Concise prose expresses its meaning clearly.

Of course, good prose can still be long-winded, as long as this heightens the effect of the work. Take this sentence from Poe’s story:

“It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good-will. I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.”

These sentences are 19 and 27 words long, respectively. They can also be summarized as follows: “Fortunato thought my smile bore good-will, not the desire to immolate him.”

What does Poe’s long-windedness afford him? Despite being easily paraphrased, every word does count in these two sentences, because they are a part of the narrator’s characterization. He is a long-winded schemer, and that affects how the story must be told, since Poe has chosen the first person to make us intimate with the narrator’s internal conflict.

Poetry is a different situation. Because poetry has line breaks, stanzas, and (sometimes) rhyme and meter, its concision takes a different form. In a poem, it’s great if every word contains heavy meaning; it’s even greater when words contain multiplicities and challenge the reader’s ideas. Economy in poetry is maximizing its impact, musicality, and richness—not necessarily its clear, single meaning.

Economy in poetry is maximizing its impact, musicality, and richness—not necessarily its clear, single meaning.

If you stretched a poem into prose, it would read like a terrible short story, because the concision afforded to poetry is different than that of prose. Concise prose focuses more on clarity of meaning, and poetry more on maximizing the richness and impact of every syllable.

Any article like this risks making literature seem binary, as though prose and poetry were totally discrete entities; so in closing, it’s good to note again that writers, especially contemporary writers, often work at the intersection of prose and poetry, resulting in genres like the prose poem , the lyrical essay or the poetry novel . (And we haven’t even touched on scriptwriting, which is a different form of communication altogether.)

There is much to explore outside of poetry and prose; this article simply covers the basics. As you advance on your writing journey, don’t be afraid to experiment with words outside of the traditional “prose vs. poetry” binary. You might be shocked by what you can accomplish!

Explore both Prose and Poetry at Writers.com

Whether you’re experimenting with poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction, Writers.com has the classes to help you succeed. Take a look at our upcoming courses —and gain valuable insights from our instructors and writing community .

Sean Glatch

Great summary. I write poetry, prose poems, flash fiction and short stories so I’m using the grab bag of everything you said here! Never taught about line breaks, though. I see some poets going willy nilly all over the page. Maybe there just aren’t any rules where this is concerned…

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Discussions about the writing craft.

What exactly is prose?

I understood prose to essentially mean ‘flow’; how a piece of writing reads off the page. Am I wrong?

Is there more than one meaning? I see people use this term all the time and often the context which it is used in doesn’t seem to fit this description.

Could someone please explain to me like I’m 5 - what is prose? Is good prose subjective or is it more technical than ones personal opinion?

Sorry if this is a basic question - I just want to make sure I have the basics right :)

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12 Classic Essays on English Prose Style

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Despite the changes in English prose over the past few centuries, we may still benefit from the stylistic observations of the old masters. Here, chronologically arranged, are 12 key passages from our collection of Classic Essays on English Prose Style .

Classic Essays on English Prose

Samuel johnson on the bugbear style.

There is a mode of style for which I know not that the masters of oratory have yet found a name; a style by which the most evident truths are so obscured, that they can no longer be perceived, and the most familiar propositions so disguised that they cannot be known. . . . This style may be called the terrifick , for its chief intention is, to terrify and amaze; it may be termed the repulsive , for its natural effect is to drive away the reader; or it may be distinguished, in plain English, by the denomination of the bugbear style , for it has more terror than danger. (Samuel Johnson, "On the Bugbear Style," 1758)

Oliver Goldsmith on Simple Eloquence

Eloquence is not in the words but in the subject, and in great concerns the more simply anything is expressed, it is generally the more sublime. True eloquence does not consist, as the rhetoricians assure us, in saying great things in a sublime style, but in a simple style, for there is, properly speaking, no such thing as a sublime style; the sublimity lies only in the things; and when they are not so, the language may be turgid, affected, metaphorical --but not affecting. (Oliver Goldsmith, "Of Eloquence," 1759)

Benjamin Franklin on Imitating the Style of the Spectator

About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator . I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With that view, I took some of the papers, and making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by for a few days, and then, without looking at the book, tried to complete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. (Benjamin Franklin, "Imitating the Style of the Spectator ," 1789)

William Hazlitt on Familiar Style

It is not easy to write a familiar style. Many people mistake a familiar for a vulgar style, and suppose that to write without affectation is to write at random. On the contrary, there is nothing that requires more precision, and, if I may so say, purity of expression, than the style I am speaking of. It utterly rejects not only all unmeaning pomp, but all low, cant phrases, and loose, unconnected, slipshod allusions . It is not to take the first word that offers, but the best word in common use. (William Hazlitt, "On Familiar Style," 1822)

Thomas Macaulay on the Bombastic Style

[Michael Sadler's style is] everything which it ought not to be. Instead of saying what he has to say with the perspicuity, the precision, and the simplicity in which consists the eloquence proper to scientific writing, he indulges without measure in vague , bombastic declamation , made up of those fine things which boys of fifteen admire, and which everybody, who is not destined to be a boy all his life, weeds vigorously out of his compositions after five-and-twenty. That portion of his two thick volumes which is not made up of statistical tables, consists principally of ejaculations , apostrophes, metaphors, similes--all the worst of their respective kinds. (Thomas Babington Macaulay, "On Sadler's Bombastic Declamations," 1831)

Henry Thoreau on a Vigorous Prose Style

The scholar might frequently emulate the propriety and emphasis of the farmer's call to his team, and confess that if that were written it would surpass his labored sentences . Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month's labor in the farmer's almanac, to restore our tone and spirits. A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plow instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. (Henry David Thoreau, "A Vigorous Prose Style," 1849)

Cardinal John Newman on the Inseparability of Style and Substance

Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one; style is a thinking out into language. This is what I have been laying down, and this is literature: not  things , not the verbal symbols of things; not on the other hand mere words; but thoughts expressed in language. . . . A great author, Gentlemen, is not one who merely has a  copia verborum , whether in prose or verse, and can, as it were, turn on at his will any number of splendid phrases and swelling sentences; but he is one who has something to say and knows how to say it. (John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, 1852)

Mark Twain on Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences

Cooper's word-sense was singularly dull. When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he does not say it. This is Cooper. He was not a word-musician. His ear was satisfied with the approximate words. . . . There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now. (Mark Twain, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences," 1895)

Agnes Repplier on the Right Words

Musicians know the value of chords; painters know the value of colors; writers are often so blind to the value of words that they are content with a bare expression of their thoughts . . .. For every sentence that may be penned or spoken the right words exist. They lie concealed in the inexhaustible wealth of a vocabulary enriched by centuries of noble thought and delicate manipulation. He who does not find them and fit them into place, who accepts the first term which presents itself rather than search for the expression which accurately and beautifully embodies his meaning, aspires to mediocrity, and is content with failure. (Agnes Repplier, "Words," 1896)

Arthur Quiller-Couch on Extraneous Ornament

[L]et me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not ; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament. . . . [I]f you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings ." (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, "On Style," 1916)

H.L. Mencken on Woodrow Wilson's Style

Woodrow knew how to conjure up such words. He knew how to make them glow, and weep. He wasted no time upon the heads of his dupes, but aimed directly at their ears, diaphragms and hearts. . . . When Wilson got upon his legs in those days he seems to have gone into a sort of trance, with all the peculiar illusions and delusions that belong to a frenzied pedagogue. He heard words giving three cheers; he saw them race across a blackboard like Socialists pursued by the Polizei ; he felt them rush up and kiss him. (H.L. Mencken, "The Style of Woodrow," 1921)

F.L. Lucas on Stylistic Honesty

As the police put it, anything you say may be used as evidence against you. If handwriting reveals character, writing reveals it still more. . . . Most style is not honest enough. Easy to say, but hard to practice. A writer may take to long words, as young men to beards—to impress. But long words, like long beards, are often the badge of charlatans. Or a writer may cultivate the obscure, to seem profound. But even carefully muddied puddles are soon fathomed. Or he may cultivate eccentricity, to seem original. But really original people do not have to think about being original—they can no more help it than they can help breathing. They do not need to dye their hair green. (F.L. Lucas, "10 Principles of Effective Style," 1955)

• style (rhetoric and composition)
• What is a Familiar Essay in Composition?
• What Is Prose?
• Mark Twain's Colloquial Prose Style
• What Is Colloquial Style or Language?
• Writer-Based Prose
• Genres in Literature
• Definition and Examples of Formal Essays
• Characteristics of a Formal Prose Style
• What Is the Running Style in English Prose?
• Purple Prose
• Plain Style in Prose
• Writers on Writing: The Art of Paragraphing
• Loose Sentence in Grammar and Prose Style
• Using the Word Pastiche
• Models of Composition

Poetry, Prose, and the Death of Civilization

View of the Roman Forum (1747), 82 cm x 134 cm oil on canvas by Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691–1765), located in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, USA.

• Henk Brunink
• — January 13, 2024

The legendary historian Will Durant famously wrote that civilizations are born stoic and die epicurean. He meant that through a warrior ethos and a propensity to endure and ignore pain, out of chaos a people might create order—the definition of civilization—which eventually grows, first prosperous, then decadent, and, finally, gives itself over fully to pleasure. It forgets the outside world and ceases to strive for higher purposes, indulging in the sensual and material as the only goal in life. Then a new group of stoics comes and conquers them. The most famous example of this phenomenon is, of course, the fall of the Roman Empire. But Indian history, however unknown in the West, actually illustrates this point clearly with its three and a half thousand years of continual invasions by younger warrior cultures: Aryans, Greeks, Kushans, Ghurid Sultans, Mughals, and Brits, who relieve one another of power once their predecessors have grown decadent in the steamy climate of the subcontinent.

But those who read on further in the first volume of his Story of Civilization will find that Durant also made another observation regarding this theme of cyclical history: “A nation begins with poetry and ends with prose.” It is a bit harder to understand what he meant by this. Near the end of the book, however, he states that poetry expresses “in perfect and irreducible form the profound characteristic[s] of a race.” He refers to the modest, quiet, and short passages of Japanese poetry, especially in comparison to the epic, bombastic, and lengthy lines that emerged in 17th-century Western verse. Thus, from its poetry, one can deduce the nature of a particular culture at a particular time. From this, we can infer that the meaning of his earlier axiomatic statement does indeed go deeper than a mere literary analysis.

When discussing poetry and the cyclical theory of history, one naturally finds oneself turning to Giambattista Vico. When not preoccupied with trying to prove the existence of giants, the early 18th-century Italian professor of rhetoric advances an ingenious theory of history in his New Science. He divides the lifecycle of a civilization into three parts: the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. Each part has its own form of language. In the first age, men communicated in grunts; in the second age, with poetry; and in the third age, with prose. Each linguistic system was essential in shaping the way its practitioners understood their world. Simultaneously, with each successive age, the power of imagination declined and the power of reason increased.

Vico posits in one of his most important axioms that “the weaker its power of reasoning, the more vigorous the human imagination grows.” Thus, he equates poetry to feeling and imagination and prose to reason. In the age of the gods, reason was nonexistent, and people lived by wonder at what they believed to be the actions of the gods. They had a totally enchanted worldview in which everything their ignorance did not allow them to understand was attributed directly to the gods. Vico calls this the barbarism of sense. The first poets, emerging at the very end of the first age, thought and spoke in symbols, “imaginative general categories or archetypes,” images formed in the mind. The poetry of the age of heroes, of which the Homeric Iliad is the foremost example, is one of archetype and myth. The poets created sublime myths through which the public might understand reality.

Then, in the age of men, myth is vanquished by logic and reason. These reductionist forces are expressed through reflective prose. The age of men eventually decays into what Vico terms the barbarism of reflection. In early paganism, every man was a poet, and everyone wondered at creation, which through verse they grasped and tamed. But now, reason begins to outweigh imagination, consuming the latter. It deconstructs the myths by which people hitherto understood their world, and it questions everything in order to categorize and explain, leading to a renewed barbarism.

Spengler develops Vico’s insights when he writes that both poetry and prose are products of the experience of a particular Lebensgefühl or ‘world feeling.’ Poetry can be equated to the becoming, the still-forming, and the dynamic—Spengler’s culture phase. Prose can be equated to the established, the stagnant, and thus the declining—Spengler’s civilization phase. Poetry attempts to arouse the soul of a people; prose attempts to deconstruct that soul into rationalized abstractions, trying to understand but not seeing that by so deconstructing, it kills the living object of study. Poetry is about the essence; prose is about the parts. Poetry deals with archetypes; prose deals with characters. Poetry is a feeling, an emotional state, or a vague sense of some sweet smell in the air; prose tries to discern what the aroma is without enjoying it.

The poetry of the heroic age gradually morphs into the prose of the age of men. Over time, the raw and rowdy gods of Homer became abstractions of perfectly rational deities, represented through statues of gleaming marble painted in colors that made them into artificial spectacles. The Greeks began with The Iliad , an epic originally recited orally, and ended with the ruthless rationalism of Socrates and the skepticism of even less heroic men (for Socrates at least served in the Peloponnesian War), eventually decaying into the universalizing categorization-fever of the Hellenistic scholars. The barbarism of reflection that followed the death of Alexander can best be seen in the grid design of his most famous city, which looks curiously similar to Manhattan. Nor do the comparisons with America end there. For even in the poetry of Whitman, at what Emerson calls the “cock crowing and the morning star” of American culture, the virility and confidence of a young people can be detected. Although the enigma that is America escaped until about half a century ago, the downward spiral of its mother civilization, the barbarism of reflection, has since taken a firm hold there, even going into overdrive.

Vico placed the beginning of Western civilization’s age of men at the Renaissance. That period and the subsequent two centuries, like Hellenistic Greece, were swept up in a craze for encyclopedizing and categorizing the entire world. Both in theology and in natural science, everything had to be labeled and structured according to rational frameworks. Rather like Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Faustian man set out on a quest to survey all of creation. To tear it apart, catalog, and subjugate it because it couldn’t accept it any other way.

Once a civilization enters the age of men, it all but loses the creative spark of the heroic age. Its literature becomes imitative and stale. Durant tells us that the later Chinese philosophical writings were nothing more than ridiculing parodies of the teachings of Confucius and Mencius. The Romans, reaching their zenith in the classical age of men, hailing the barbarism of reflection that soon followed, brought law and administration, but little culture—prose, but no poetry. Even its greatest cultural gift, Virgil’s Aeneid , was a stale imitation of the Greek genre. It was an artificial epic, not the foundational poem of a people. His age was only yet capable of imitation, then mockery, and eventually exhaustion. As the great art historian Kenneth Clark noted, civilizations thrive on confidence and die of exhaustion.

In these exhausted civilizations, myth and story—poetry—are replaced by explanation and statistics—prose. They become mired in Apollonian excess, where everything must be rationally explained and picked apart. The American historian Henry Adams allegorized this system as ‘the dynamo.’ This was a purely rationalistic and materialistic Lebensgefühl, where everything was determined only by the grinding of gears and the endless rotation of the dynamo. Sociologist Max Weber would soon after describe modernity as disenchanted. Poetry leaves the world, and in its wake, only mechanical explanations remain.

Such an arrangement creates men who, as C.S. Lewis put it, are “without chests.” They have an oversized head but no heart. They suck all poetic meaning out of objects. For them, there is no room for heroes, let alone for gods. The Atlantic is not the great sea where Columbus and Drake sailed westwards to a land Europeans had always dreamt of as a paradise, but simply a body of water in a particular geographic location. There is no sublimity in a waterfall. The only magic in the world is that which you mistakenly attribute to it. The entire world has been disenchanted. Such an apprehension of being marks a textbook example of the barbarism of reflection.

The modern West is completely submerged in prose. There are no more archetypes, no more myths. Everything must be atomized into infinite minorities. The inherited stories of bygone eras, supposed to teach moral lessons, are deconstructed and stripped bare in preparation for ruthless examination. Even in the academic discipline of history, a prominent school of thought posits that history ought not to be used for any social, cultural, or political purpose. It is solely practiced for the accumulation and categorization of knowledge of past events. Historia magistra vitae —history as the teacher of life—as Cicero prescribed, is anathema. In fact, the entire notion seems offensive to about half of academic, bean-counting historians.

Yet, at the very end of a civilization’s life, during the darkest nights of winter, the exhausted people begin to yearn for spring. Their gods have been deconstructed, explained away, and cast aside as outdated. But that does not mean that a culture dies in unbelief. Strangely enough, in the age of prose’s dying days, people will turn away from their soulless world and seek solace in foreign, poetic religions. The late Egyptians ignored the sacrilege of their traditional gods and only became outraged at Achaemenid subjugation when Cambyses slew their sacred Apis bull, which had only recently superseded the other deities. The atheistic Greeks of the Hellenistic age fell in love with Babylonian astrology. The Romans became obsessed with the underground caverns in which hooded figures celebrated the mysteries of the Persian Mithras, or instead with the emotional ecstasy of early Christianity. Desperate to re-enchant their world, they allowed themselves one last crescendo before their light was snuffed out. One wonders what strange cults our ailing civilization will take to, or perhaps has already adopted.

Durant embedded within a fleeting statement about literary history, timeless truths about disenchantment and decay. We should take stock, for on a civilization’s deathbed, its people, in their final throes, cry out one last time for myth and enchantment. Thus, a people begins with poetry, ends with prose, but dies mesmerized again by poetry.

• Tags: civilization , decline of the West , Henk Brunink , Oswald Spengler , Western Civilization

The Seductiveness of Ideology in Politics

An Uncertain Future for Conservative Christians: An Interview with Rod Dreher

Norman Stone (1941-2019)

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U.K. Officials Express Relief After Far-Right Protests Fail to Materialize

The authorities had been braced for further violence after anti-immigrant demonstrations in previous days had descended into riots.

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By Stephen Castle

Reporting from London

British officials on Thursday expressed relief and cautious optimism after far-right protests failed to materialize the previous night and thousands of antiracism demonstrators took to the streets instead.

The authorities had been braced for further violence after anti-immigrant protests in previous days had descended into riots, fueled by disinformation about the fatal stabbing of three young children at a dance class in Southport, northwestern England, on July 29.

But with around 6,000 officers on standby, Wednesday evening passed with little violence. Pockets of far-right protesters were easily outnumbered by antiracism counterdemonstrations in several cities, including Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool and London.

That raised hopes that the law enforcement authorities had begun to regain control after riots over the previous weekend. Hundreds of people were arrested and dozens of police officers were injured in those outbreaks of violence, which saw rioters set cars on fire and target mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers.

Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, said on Thursday that a repetition of that violence was largely avoided overnight because “we had police deployed, in numbers, in the right places giving reassurance to communities.”

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