What titles tell us: The prose poem in the little magazines of early modernism

Abstract

This essay takes up the question of the prose poem as a marginal genre in British and American modernism and examines its presence in the little magazines during the second decade of the twentieth century through 1920. Employing Gérard Genette’s notion of the ‘paratext’, I look at the function of titles in establishing or suggesting genre. While direct references to the ‘prose poem’ or ‘poem in prose’ are rare, titling practices perform a number of functions that shape possibilities for the genre. Translations of poetry in prose form appear, and their titles, in identifying the source, draw on past literary traditions, thus legitimising poetry in prose. Titles that employ analogies with other art forms assert a status for the texts as art, and suggest ways of reading them. Finally many titles evoke an ontology of the partial, the fleeting, and the fragmented, while the prose poems play out these modernist themes and demonstrate the form’s experimental edge.