Of Joan Didion’s clipped style in A Book of Common Prayer, Martin Amis once remarked: “The most poetic thing about Miss Didion’s prose in this novel is that it doesn’t go all the way across the page.” ...

American prose poetry—a tradition extending from Robert Bly to Lyn Hejinian—has finally come into its own. Although prose poems defy easy classification—they are, as the name indicates, neither ...

An essential collection of prose poems from across the globe, by old masters and new, reveals the form’s astonishing range You might think of a prose poem as a bastardised form – neither one thing nor ...

Prose poetry is a literary form that combines elements of prose and poetry to create a unique narrative voice and style. It appears as standard prose, without line breaks, but utilizes poetic devices ...

The critic William Hazlitt (1778–1830), known best in his lifetime for his writing on Shakespeare, was a jack of all trades and a master of none too few, trying his deft hand at painting, philosophy, ...

When most people think of fantasy, they picture sprawling wars, fire-breathing dragons, and quests for crowns. But another branch of the genre has been quietly flourishing: lyrical fantasy. These are ...

The Idea of Perfection: The Prose and Poetry of Paul Valéry, translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (image courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux) In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” ...

Perhaps since Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, poets have been using prose to understand how poems and poetry work. Something about the procedures of prose, its civilities and solidity, ...

A work of biography, an essay on literature and memory and the South, a prose poem full of lyrical dexterity, Trethewey’s latest book is like all of her others: a master study of the self. If, as Zora ...

“YOU campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” No politician, surely, ever adhered to Mario Cuomo's mantra more completely than did Ian Paisley, who died today. This fierce Northern Irish unionist was ...