Although the Bible is written in prose, it maintains poetic features such as rhythms and lyricism. In 17th-century Japan,
Matsuo Bashō originated
haibun, a form of prose poetry combining
haiku with prose. It is best exemplified by his book
Oku no Hosomichi, in which he used a literary genre of prose-and-poetry composition of multidimensional writing. In the West, prose poetry originated in early-19th-century
France and
Germany as a reaction against the traditional
verse line. The
German Romantics Jean Paul,
Novalis,
Friedrich Hölderlin, and
Heinrich Heine may be seen as precursors of the prose poem. Earlier, 18th-century European forerunners of prose poetry had included
James Macpherson's "translation" of
Ossian and
Évariste de Parny's "
Chansons madécasses". At the time of the prose poem's establishment as a form,
French poetry was dominated by the
alexandrine, a strict and demanding form that poets starting with
Maurice de Guérin (whose "Le Centaure" and "La Bacchante" remain arguably the most powerful prose poems ever written) and
Aloysius Bertrand (in
Gaspard de la nuit) chose, in almost complete isolation, to cease using. Later
Charles Baudelaire,
Arthur Rimbaud, and
Stéphane Mallarmé followed their example in works like
Paris Spleen and
Illuminations. The prose poem continued to be written in France into the 20th century by such writers as
Max Jacob,
Henri Michaux,
Gertrude Stein, and
Francis Ponge. In Poland,
Juliusz Słowacki wrote a prose poem,
Anhelli, in 1837.
Bolesław Prus (1847–1912), influenced by the French prose poets, wrote a number of poetic
micro-stories, including "
Mold of the Earth" (1884), "
The Living Telegraph" (1884) and "
Shades" (1885). His somewhat longer story, "
A Legend of Old Egypt" (1888), likewise shows many features of prose poetry. In 1877–1882 Russian novelist
Turgenev wrote several 'Poems in prose' (
Стихотворения в прозе) which have neither poetic rhythm nor rhymes but resemble poetry in concise but expressive form. The writings of
Syrian poet and writer
Francis Marrash (1836–73) featured the first examples of prose poetry in modern
Arabic literature. From the mid-20th century, the great Arab exponent of prose poetry was the Syrian poet,
Adunis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber, born 1930), a perennial contender for the
Nobel Prize in Literature. The
Modernist poet
T. S. Eliot wrote vehemently against prose poems. He added to the debate about what defines the genre, writing in his introduction to
Djuna Barnes' highly poeticized 1936 novel
Nightwood that it could not be classed as "poetic prose" as it did not show the rhythm or "musical pattern" of verse. By contrast, other Modernist authors, including
Gertrude Stein and
Sherwood Anderson, consistently wrote prose poetry. Poet and critic
Donald Sidney-Fryer, a leading scholar of the works of American poet
Clark Ashton Smith, praised "the extremely picturesque or pictorial character of many of Smith's typical, far-ranging, and most polished fantasies, his extended poems in prose."
Canadian author
Elizabeth Smart's
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945) is a relatively isolated example of mid-20th-century English-language poetic prose. Prose poems made a resurgence in the early 1950s and in the 1960s with American poets
Allen Ginsberg,
Bob Dylan,
Jack Kerouac,
William S. Burroughs,
Russell Edson,
Charles Simic,
Robert Bly,
John Ashbery, and
James Wright. Simic won the
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1989 collection, ''The World Doesn't End''. Since the late 1980s, prose poetry has gained in popularity. Journals have begun specializing in
prose poems or microfiction. In the
United Kingdom, Stride Books published a 1993 anthology of prose poetry,
A Curious Architecture. ==See also==