Prose Poem

The prose poem is a lyric genre of an intermediate, synthetic nature: in outward form it is a prose text, not divided into verse lines and devoid of rhyme and regular meter, but in content and mood it is lyric, with its characteristic emotional concentration, imagery, musicality of language, and meditativeness. The genre was established by the French poet Charles Baudelaire (Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose) and developed by Arthur Rimbaud and Ivan Turgenev (Poems in Prose). This form allows the freedom of prose to be joined with the lyric tension of poetry. In Ukrainian literature the prose poem was approached by Vasyl Stefanyk (his terse, dramatic miniatures are close to this genre), Marko Cheremshyna, and the modernist writers of the early twentieth century, who sought to renew the means of lyric expression and convey the subtlest movements of the soul.