The Prose Poem’s Post-Romantic Inheritance

Abstract

This chapter discusses prose poetry's connection to Romanticism. Although contemporary writers take the fragmentary nature of the prose poem for granted, it was once an important innovation to celebrate fragmentary literary forms — an innovation that took hold with the Romantic movement. Given the relationship between prose poetry and the Romantic fragment, comprehending one offers the opportunity to better appreciate the other. Moreover, if “the extended influence of Romantic fragments into Modernist and even Postmodernist poetry” is uncovered, then this underscores the view that the contemporary prose poem is simultaneously a product of postmodernism, modernism, and Romanticism. While contemporary prose poetry is sometimes self consciously fractured and fragmentary, destabilizing and interrupting notions of TimeSpace in ways Romantic writers rarely attempted, the prose poem's Romantic inheritance remains.