What is a prose work? The difference between a poem and a prose work

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

It is customary to talk about what a prose work is only against the background of its difference from a poetic text, however, oddly enough, with the seeming obvious difference between a poetic text and a prose text, to formulate what exactly this difference consists in than the essence of the specifics of poetry and prose, why these two types of speech exist, is rather difficult.

Problems of differentiation between prose and verse

Modern literary criticism, studying the difference between a poem and a prose work, raises the following curious questions:

1. Which speech is more natural for culture: poetry or prose?
2. What is a prose work compared to a poetic one?
3. What are the clear criteria for distinguishing between poetry and prose text?
4. Due to what resources of the language does a prose text turn into a poetic one?
5. How deep is the difference between poetry and prose? Is it limited to the organization of speech or does it concern the system of thought?

What comes first: poetry or prose?

Writer and literary critic Yan Parandovsky, reflecting on what a prose work is, once noted that there is no scientific evidence that humanity first spoke in verse, not prose, but it is poetry that stands at the origins of the literature of different countries rather than prose speech. This happened due to the fact that it was verse that first rose above everyday speech and poetic speech reached its perfection long before the first attempts at fiction appeared.

Jan Parandowski is a little cunning, because in fact there are a considerable number of scientific hypotheses, which are based on the assumption that initially human speech was poetic. G. Vico, and G. Gadamer, and M. Shapir spoke about this. But Parandovsky noticed one thing for sure: world literature really begins with poetry, and not with prose. The genres of prose works developed later than the genres of poetry.

Why exactly the poetic speech arose is not yet known exactly. Perhaps this is due to the idea of the general rhythmicity of the human body and the world around the person, perhaps with the original rhythm of children's speech (which, in turn, also awaits explanation).

Criteria for the difference between verse and prose

The well-known versifier Mikhail Gasparov saw the difference between a poem and a prose work, that a poetic text is felt as a text of increased importance and is designed for repetition and memorization. The poetic text, in addition to being divided into sentences and parts of sentences, is also divided into parts that are very easily grasped by consciousness.

This observation is inherently very deep, but it is not instrumental, as it does not imply clear criteria for distinguishing between verse and prose. After all, prose can also be of increased importance and can also be designed for memorization.

Formal signs of difference between prose and verse texts

Formal signs of difference - short sentence fragments - also cannot be recognized as a sufficient reason. A. G. Mashevsky notes that in fact, even a newspaper article can be turned into poetry by simply dividing its sentences into fragments of different lengths and writing each of them from a new line.

However, it will be too noticeable that the sentences are divided conditionally, no additional meaning is given to the text by this division, except for a humorous or ironic sound.

Thus, the differences between prose and poetry are not in any one feature, but suggest some profound differences. To understand what a prose work is, you need to know that prose and verse texts obey different laws of text organization and the ordering of its elements.

Word in verse and prose

It so happened that traditionally prose is defined by its difference from verse. More often it is customary to talk not about distinctivefeatures of prose compared to verse, and vice versa - about the difference between verse and prose.

and tightness of the verse series,”and this concept is still relevant for literary criticism.

Two trends in resolving the issue

Modern science has made many attempts to formulate what a prose work is, in contrast to a poetic work, and in these attempts two tendencies can be quite clearly distinguished. A number of philologists believe that the most important criterion is the specificity of the sound of the text. This approach can be called phonetic. In line with this tradition of understanding prose and verse, V. M. Zhirmunsky spoke out, according to whom the difference between poetic speech lies in the “regular ordering of the sound form”. However, unfortunately or fortunately, not all prose and poetic works clearly differ from each other phonetically.

In contrast to this tradition, graphic theory insists on the primacy of the nature of the recording of the work. If the entry is ordered as a verse (written “in a column”, then the work is poetic, if the text is written “in a line”, then it is prosaic). In line with this hypothesis, the modern versifier Yu. B. Orlitsky works. However, this criterion is not enough. As already mentioned above, a newspaper text written "incolumn "does not become poetic from this. Pushkin's prose works, written down as poetry, will not become poetic because of this.

Thus, it must be admitted that there are no external, formal criteria for distinguishing between prose and poetic texts. These differences are deep and relate to the sound, grammatical, intonational, and genre nature of the work.