The difference between poetry and prose

Prose is all about accumulation (a morality of work), while poetry as it is practiced today is about the isolation of feelings (an aesthetics of omission). Among other things, prose is principally an ethical project, while poetry is amoral, a tampering with truths which the world of prose (and its naturalistic approach to mimesis) takes for granted. Poetry creates its own truth, which at times is the same truth as the world’s, and sometimes not. Whatever the case, its mimesis is always a rearrangement, at a molecular level, of that axis between the “seen” and the “felt” (that coal chute which connects the childish eye to the Socratic heart), which, were it not for poetry, with its misguided elenchus, would remain obscured. In both classical and modern languages it is poetry that evolves first and is only much later followed by prose, as though in a language’s childhood, as in our own, poetry were the more efficient communicator of ideas. Whether this has to do with the nature of ideation or some characteristic intrinsic to the material evolution of tongues has never been adequately decided. Probably this evolution, from poetry to prose, depends on synergy—between the passion for thought and enthusiasm for new means. Technology also played a roll. With the spread of the printing press after 1440, texts no longer had to be memorized. Poetry’s inbuilt mnemonics (rhyme, meter, refrain, line breaks) were no longer essential for processing and holding on to knowledge. Little hard drives were suddenly everywhere available. But even a century later, in Elizabethan England, English prose had not yet come close to achieving the flexibility of poetry. One need only compare Shakespeare’s blank verse soliloquies to the abashed prose of one of the Elizabethans’ greatest disputants, Richard Hooker, or to the Martin Marprelate tracts. These are differences not only in talent but ones inherent to the medium. Even the King James Bible, “the noblest monument of English prose,” cannot compare to the blank verse of Shakespeare.