A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (review)

The thesis of this book is that certain anomalous works in prose constitute a distinct genre—or “anti-genre”—whose “poeticity” (an unhappy word) is established by subverting the norms of conventional narrative, descriptive, and contemplative prose. It was inaugurated in France by Aloysius Bertrand and Baudelaire, and its practitioners there included Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Henri de Régnier. Stuart Merrill’s collection of translations, Pastels in Prose (1890), introduced it to English audiences, and it flourished briefly in such examples of late nineteenth-century decadence as Ernest Dowson’s Decorations in Prose (1899) and Wilde’s Poems in Prose (1894). The received view is that the genre did not transplant well into English in part because the foil of the rigid French prosodic tradition was missing, and also because public reaction against decadence and aestheticism following Wilde’s downfall reduced it to marginal status. The genre appeared thereafter only occasionally—in Eliot’s early symbolist period for example (“Hysteria,” 1915), and more recently in the works of surrealist-influenced American poets like Michael Benedikt, Robert Bly, and W. S. Merwin. Yet Murphy’s claim is that the real impulse behind the prose poem did not dissipate, but continued to inform the writings of such high modernists as Williams and Stein, and contemporary works like John Ashbery’s Three Poems (1972) and Robert Creeley’s Presences: A Text for Marisol (1976) (though Murphy does not discuss the latter). This impulse is contestatory: the true mark of the prose poem is not the brevity, closure, and interiority of its decadent instances, but rather the attempt to undermine and mock the idea of fixed genres—in particular, those of narrative and discursive prose—as well as the social, sexual, and political conventions associated with fixed genres. Thus Dowson’s poems parody the fairy tale, and Wilde’s the biblical parable (though the prose poem of Murphy’s title is his notorious letter to Lord Alfred Douglas). The fragmentary and unpredictable character of Williams’s Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1918) frustrates the reader’s expectations and the provincialism said to underlie them; Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) disrupts English syntax and plays against such models of women’s prose as cookbooks, etiquette manuals, and fashion magazines; and Ashbery’s Three Poems subverts the contemplative meditation by resisting philosophical closure and rendering the idea of the writing and thinking subject problematic.

Though many of Murphy’s discussions of particular writers are interesting (for example, of Stein and women’s writing, and of Ashbery’s pronominal vagaries), the book as a whole seems unconvincing, largely because of the strategy of its underlying argument. It posits a classification that encompasses far more than the prose poems derived from the original French model—a classification which is then declared, not too surprisingly, to be problematic. Since the examples given of this expanded genre have so few substantive qualities in common, the “poeticity” they are presumed to share must then be characterized negatively, by contrasting them with a stereotypical model of “normal” prose. Yet the conceptions of both prose and poetry adduced in this argument are too tidy and simple to accommodate much of the literature of modernism and its aftermath.

First, the model of normal prose Murphy posits strikes me as a fantasy. The aim of rhetoric at least since Quintillian has been to expand the affective capabilities of language by calculated departures from the straightforwardly declarative. The period under discussion is marked at its inception by the introspective ruminations of such “great prose brooders” ¹ as James and Proust, and encompasses both the Kantian speculations of A Man without Qualities and the “novels” of Ronald Firbank. One need only reflect on the fact (mentioned by Murphy) that the same issues of The Little Review in which parts of Kora in Hell first appeared also contained excerpts from Ulysses to find the dichotomy between conventional and subverted prose somewhat tendentious. Murphy...