The emergence of this omnipresent dichotomy is surprisingly recent. Scholars Charles LaPorte and Stefanie Markovits have both noted that “poetry” was used as a generic term for all creative literature, including prose, throughout most of the 19thcentury. Why did this single system give way to a binary one? The standard explanation places the impetus on prose alone: the rise of prose fiction (especially the novel) forced a paradigm shift, “poetry” had to move over for “prose,” and our modern-day dichotomy was born, or so the story goes.
We aim to counter this oversimplified narrative by accounting for the complexity of conversations and creations drawing on notions of poetry and/or prose during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. In so doing, we build on a growing body of scholarship that questions the very practice of historicizing prose fiction separately from poems, some of which has been published or is forthcoming from the prospective panelists themselves. These studies include Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay’s The Emergence of Prose (1987), G. Gabrielle Starr’s Lyric Generations (2004), Stefanie Markovits’s The Victorian Verse-Novel (2017), Dino Franco Felluga and Emily Allen’s current book project, The Verse-Novel and the Problem of Form, plus articles by Mary Favret, Ann Wierda Rowland, Nick Bujak, and Lizzy LeRud.
While the studies above begin to trace the history of the poetry-prose binary, they offer only partial answers to our questions of the binary’s emergence and persistence. By continuing to illuminate our literary past, the panelists will suggest new approaches to literary history, genre studies, and interpretations of texts both old and new. Ultimately, thinking through the histories of the poetry-prose binary is to go beyond them, recovering texts that resist the binary and exposing its power to corral texts into either “poetry” or “prose.”
Nick Bujak will begin by exploring early notions of the poetry-prose relationship that gave rise to binary thinking. Bujak argues that the concept of “the novel” has always been connected to poetry, and that developments in theoretical understandings of poetry in the wake of the rise of the novel have continuously been framed not incidentally but essentially in terms of poetry’s relation to prose and the novel. He charts the broad outline of the emergence of this concept cluster, first, by drawing on theories of the novel and poetry as they developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, second, by employing a method (developed by Peter de Bolla) to distinguish patterns of conceptual development against the backdrop of the hundreds of thousands of historical documents that have been collected and digitized in the Gale archive. Altogether, Bujak argues that the interrelation between “poetry” and “the novel” has become codified in our conceptual schema as a result of constant usage over the last several hundred years.
Working from this historical overview, Dino Franco Felluga will concentrate on the inherent hybridity of the verse-novel to explore a new way of thinking about form and its relation to genre that moves beyond the false belief that verse and novel are mutually exclusive. As Fellluga argues, the verse-novel functions more like Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit, in which an unchanging drawing is perceived as shifting between the “aspect” of a duck and then of a rabbit. Moreover, “verse” and “novel” were, in the nineteenth century, increasingly understood as competing “aspects” for viewing the world and understanding the self, much in the same way that Wittgenstein describes the gestalt experience of “duck-rabbit.” Ultimately, Felluga navigates between two ways of defining “generic”—the traditional taxonomic way and a new way opened up by Alain Badiou in his adoption of the sense of “generic” defined by Paul Cohen—in order to revisit perennial questions about the distinction between knowledge and truth.
Tracing persistent anxieties surrounding notions of the dichotomy in American writers from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Susan Howe, Stefania Heim posits the shifting boundaries between poetry and prose forms as constituting a method for reading. Heim strikes a way into the dichotomy not by calling or not-calling something poetry, but by reading poetically: attention to sonic play; spatial structure; relation-making through metaphor, analogy, and juxtaposition, uncertainty and elision. Heim argues for a reading practice that does not so much interpret but revel in the spaces that emerge between these forms, spaces that in turn expose the stakes of other big dichotomies mirrored in its terms: life and death, private and public, and what is within the distances between us, the gulfs.
Lizzy LeRud will end this session by assessing the status of the binary in today’s discourses of poetry. LeRud asks why the poetry-prose binary persists in the modern era, a period when critics generally agree that any perceived differences between poetry and prose are relative, not essential. Comparing modern and contemporary defenses of poetry with earlier defenses by Philip Sidney and Percy Shelley, LeRud uncovers a recent tradition of fearmongering that’s especially fixated on how poetry’s place of prestige was usurped by prose. While these recent defenders of poetry generally admit that the binary is illogical, they embrace the idea that prose is poetry’s adversary. Tracing such thinking from Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ezra Pound to Mary Kinzie and Dana Gioia, LeRud argues that the persistence of the poetry-prose binary against all logic is directly connected to an antagonistic, anxious strain of poetry promotion.