Prose is written or spoken language that typically follows the natural flow of speech. Understanding prose is important because it helps us analyse how authors use and depart from the conventions of prose in their writing to create meaning. In literature, prose is an important building block of a narrative and a literary device.
Prose writing
Prose is the fabric of storytelling, and it is woven together by threads of words.
Most writing that you encounter on a daily basis is prose.
Types of prose
- Non-fictional prose: news articles, biographies, essays.
- Fictional prose: novels, short stories, screenplays.
- Heroic prose: legends and fables.
Both fictional and non-fictional can also be poetic prose. This is more a quality of prose rather than a type. If the writer or speaker employs poetic qualities such as vivid imagery and musical qualities, we call this poetic prose.
A brief literary history of prose
In literature, poetry and verse came before prose. Homer’s Odyssey is a 24-book-long epic poem written circa 725–675 BCE.
Up until the 18th century, literature was dominated by verse, as fictional prose was seen as more low-brow and artless. This is evident in Shakespeare’s plays, where his upper-class characters often speak in verse, and the lower-class characters often speak in prose. In Shakespeare, prose was also used for casual conversations, while verse was reserved for more lofty utterances.
Twelfth Night (1602) opens with lines in verse about love from Duke Orsino:
ORSINO
If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
(Shakespeare, Act One, Scene One, Twelfth Night, 1602).
Sir Toby, on the other hand, defends his sloppy drunken ways in prose:
TOBY
Confine? I’ll confine myself no finer than I am.
These clothes are good enough to drink in, and so
be these boots too. And they be not, let them hang
themselves in their own straps!
(Shakespeare, Act One, Scene Three, Twelfth Night, 1602).
The 18th century saw the rise of the novel and, with it, a shift in how literary prose was regarded, leading more and more writers to use prose instead of verse. Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740) was a highly successful work of prose, which popularised prose literature and attested to its artistic value.
Today, prose literature – fictional words like novels and non-fictional texts like feature articles and biographies – continue to dominate popular literature.
Differences between prose and poetry
The differences between traditional prose and poetry jump out at us from their formatting alone: prose looks like big chunks of text on a page, while poetry looks like a sequence of broken-up lines.
Let’s look at the conventional differences between prose and poetry.
Conventions of prose | Conventions of poetry |
Prose is written in the natural patterns of everyday speech. Prose is often straightforward and unrefined, and facts are communicated in plain language. | Poetry is more carefully constructed and refined. Vivid imagery and wordplay are key defining features of poetry. |
Sentences should follow the correct syntax and be clear and easy to understand. | Poets manipulate syntax, arranging words in unconventional orders to emphasise and/or connect certain words and/or imagery. |
Prose is loosely organised into words, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, headings or chapters. | Poetry is more strictly organised by syllables, words, feet, lines, stanzas, and cantos. |
Clauses and sentences are structured logically and naturally follow on from one another. Prose is narrative-focused. | Poems can tell a narrative, but this is often secondary to the expression of emotions and associations between images. |
Prose doesn’t follow patterns of sound such as metre, rhyme, or rhythm. | Poetry places emphasis on the musical qualities of the words: patterns of sound such as metre, rhythm, and rhyme are used. Sound techniques such as assonance, sibilance, and alliteration are also employed. |
Prose writing often goes into a lot of detail. This makes prose writing quite long. | Poetry is about compressing and condensing: poets squeeze as much meaning as possible out of every word. As such, poems or at least stanzas, are usually quite short. |
There are no line breaks. | Poems have deliberate line breaks. |
Prose-poetry spectrum
Prose and poetry are not fixed categories and can overlap a lot. So, it is more helpful to think of prose and poetry as being on a spectrum rather than as opposites:
Diagram: Prose and poetry on a spectrum. On the far left is the most run-of-the-mill prose you can imagine. On the far right, you have conventional poetry, written with line breaks, meter, rhyme, and imagery.
On the left, we also have creative prose and poetic prose, which is still prose while also possessing poetic qualities that push it out of the ‘conventional prose’ zone. We can say that creative prose is any prose that is written imaginatively and aims to persuade rather than just report facts. Poetic prose is any prose that has distinctly poetic qualities, such as vivid imagery, and distinctly musical qualities.
On the right, we have prose poetry – poetry written in prose instead of verse – and free verse, poetry without rhyme or rhythm. These count as poetry but are a bit more prose-y because they don’t really adhere to the rules of verse.
A plain, factual weather report: ‘Tonight there will be strong winds and heavy showers.’
A creative description of the weather: ‘Only wind in the trees which blew the wires and made the lights go off and on again as if the house had winked into the darkness.’
(F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chapter Five, The Great Gatsby, 1925).
Verse
As writers are always innovating the forms they work with, prose and poetry can’t be broken up into two neat categories. It is more useful to compare the differences between writing that is prose and writing that is in verse.
Verse is writing with a metrical rhythm.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
(William Blake, ‘The Tyger’, 1794).
This poem is written in verse. The metre is trochaic tetrameter (four feet of trochees, which is one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable), and the rhyme scheme is in rhyming couplets (two consecutive lines that rhyme).
- Prose is any writing that does not follow a metrical rhythm.
- Poetry is often written in verse.
- Verse is writing that follows a metrical rhythm.
Examples of different types of prose in literature
Let’s take a look at some examples of prose along the prose-poetry spectrum.
Poetic prose
Many authors of fiction can be said to have a poetic writing style. Virginia Woolf’s style, for example, has poetic qualities:
All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others (Virginia Woolf, Chapter Eleven, To the Lighthouse, 1927).
In this sentence, the first clause builds a quick pace with the harder consonants ‘p’, ‘g’, ‘t’, ‘c’, and ‘d’. After the semi-colon, the sentence deflates with soft assonant sounds – ‘sense’, ‘solemnity’, ‘oneself’, ‘invisible’, ‘others’ – being broken up by the vivid imagery of ‘a wedge-shaped core of darkness’, which sticks out of the sentence like a wedge driven through it.
Virginia Woolf’s prose novels benefit from being read aloud like poetry, and like poetry, they command the reader to pay close attention to and delight in every word.
Prose poetry
Prose poetry is a good example of why we can’t just say prose and poetry are opposites.
Prose poetry is poetry written in sentences and paragraphs, instead of verse, without line breaks. Like conventional poetry, prose poetry is centred around vivid imagery and wordplay rather than narrative.
Prose poetry resists straightforward categorisation. Take a look at this excerpt from a prose poem:
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling.
(Amy Lowell, ‘Spring Day’, 1874–1925).
In the excerpt from ‘The Tyger’ above, you can immediately tell that it’s a poem just by looking at it. But this extract from ‘Spring Day’ looks like it could have been taken out of a novel. Maybe what makes it a poem is its length; it is just 172 words. This prose poem is centred around vivid imagery of a bath in the sunlight, and it sounds pleasant when read aloud.
Prose - Key takeaways
Prose is written or spoken language that typically follows the natural flow of speech.
The use of poetry and verse in literature predated the use of prose, but prose took over as a popular writing form in the 18th century.
Prose and poetry are not two distinct categories but can instead be understood as being on a spectrum. On one end, there are prose conventions, while on the other, there are poetry conventions.
The extent to which prose and poetry texts adhere to conventions places them along the scale of prose and poetry. Prose writers such as Virginia Woolf write poetic prose, while poets like Amy Lowell write prose poetry that disturbs the false dichotomy of prose and poetry.
It is more helpful to compare prose against verse than against poetry. Verse is writing with a metrical rhythm.
Writers use and break prose and poetry conventions to create meaning.
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