Abstract
Roman Jakobson describes the poetic function as being peculiarly self-focused. Poetry is uniquely bent upon investigating its own potency as language. So what of the prose poem, a form that stands seemingly midway between poetry and prose? Does it still perform Jakobson’s poetic function, or does it edge closer to prose? This essay questions the prose poem through examples of prose that could be deemed as prose poetry, but the author examines why and why not. The thirty short sections of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns constantly exhibit linguistic intensity and rhythmic potency, but no rhyme. They focus the question of the prose poem at its most problematic and, again, this essay asks why.
Some parts of this essay have previously appeared in Agenda. Permission granted by the author.
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Notes
- 1.
Qtd. in Peter and Jean Medawar, Aristotle to Zoos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
- 2.
Reprinted in Ernest Hemingway , The Collected Stories, ed. James Fenton (Everyman’s Library, 1995).
- 3.
Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter (London: Bloomsbury, 1976).
- 4.
Richard Ellmann , James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 85.
- 5.
Geoffrey Hill , interview in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation, ed. John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 93.
- 6.
Geoffrey Hill , Mercian Hymns , in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 91.
- 7.
Hill, Mercian Hymns , 92.
- 8.
In fact, in Baudelaire’s various sets of prose poems, the intense Parisian sections, those meditations on crowds and boulevards, on speed and ruin and the annihilation of the old city’s identity, represent a relatively small part of the whole, though arguably by far the most compelling. It was the mixing of human genres that Haussmann’s boulevards involved, which made the poet reach for a new form capable of capturing this promiscuous and inclusive hubbub. The non-stanzaic form allows him an immediacy of response to this mingling of levels of perception, and different types of activity.
- 9.
Hill, Mercian Hymns , 103.
- 10.
Ibid., 99.
- 11.
Ibid., 106.
Works Cited
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House, Project Gutenberg eBook. https://archive.org/stream/bleakhouse01023gut/1023.txt.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Collected Stories. Edited by James Fenton. London: Everyman’s Library, 1995.
Hill, Geoffrey, and Mercian Hymns. Interviewed. In Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation, edited by John Haffenden. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
———. In Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, edited by Kenneth Haynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Medawar, Peter, and Jean Medawar. Aristotle to Zoos. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter. London: Bloomsbury, 1976.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, 1602. Act V, Scene 1.
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Wall, A. (2018). Questioning the Prose Poem: Thoughts on Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns. In: Monson, J. (eds) British Prose Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_10
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