Skip to main content

Prose and Poetry: Just How Similar are They?

It feels almost mandatory to insert some sort of greeting or preface on my first blog post, so here it goes. My name is Connor Morley, and I'm a freshman at the Post Oak Montessori High School. My various passions include running, science, and pretty much anything nerdy and/or geeky.

This week in ELA (English and Language Arts) we discussed poetry and how it can be variously interpreted. A topic in our key lesson was prose vs. poetry, but more specifically, how prose and poetry can be separated and intertwined. 

The basic definition of poetry is language that is generally visual and symbolic, often full of metaphorical and non-literal speech. However, what truly sets poetry apart is its use of rhythm and meter (beat). Prose, on the other hand, is speech that uses traditional English grammatical flow and conventions. Examples of prose include everyday speech, most novels, and informational articles.

When prose crosses with poetry, things become a little more muddled. In prose poetry, the rhythm is in fact general sentence flow, however it can still be distinguished as poetry in that, like poetry, prose will use short, condensed sentences and vivid imagery as well as non-literal language in the vein of traditional poetry.
Labels:

Comments

  1. HunterSeptember 14, 2016 at 7:08 PM

    I think you got the distinction between poetry and prose across very well. The only revision I might suggest is grammatical: I think after the word "speech" in paragraph 3 sentence 1, you should start a new sentence instead of typing a dash.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Use of Formulaic Language in the Odyssey

Because the Odyssey  was written circa. 800 B.C.E, it obviously wasn't meant to be read by a bunch of high-schoolers at a Montessori school in 2016 Houston, Texas. It, gathered from research by linguists, archaeologists, and historians, was almost certainly meant to be performed. I don't think anybody has mentioned that only the major or supporting characters in the Odyssey are given epithets (ie. "Owl-eyed Athena, godly Nestor, Red-haired Menelaus "), and there is quite a lot of supporting characters for a relatively short epic compared to the length of fantasy & epic literature today. Because of this, these epithets were not only used for rhythm and splendor when performing. In fact, some were likely put there to remind the audience members of characters that haven't been seen in a while. However, for the characters like Zeus, Poseidon, and Athena who appear often, the performance explanation seems to be the greatest. However, another possible reason is ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sound Devices in "We Real Cool"

THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon. We Real Cool" is a great piece of literature. It doesn't take more than fifteen seconds to read, and yet I found it to be one of the most interesting poems I have come across, not only for its surprisingly deep meaning, but also for it's enjoyable and catchy use of sound devices. Some uses of sound devices in the poem are obvious. For example, the two sentences in each stanza (not counting the use of enjambment with the word "we", which, by the way, is an interesting visual choice) produce a couplet, as they rhyme. However, looking deeper into the poem, we start to see more hidden devices, such as the consecutive rhyme "we thin gin" and the fact that on the first and second lines of the second and and the first line of the fourth stanza, al...
Post a Comment
Read more

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: Why Were Slaves Separated from their Families?

Frederick Douglass, as mentioned at the very beginning of Chapter I, was separated from his mother at a very young age. In fact, really the only thing he remembers of her is the fact that she talked to him at nights when he was a very young boy - but when he woke up in the morning, she was gone. Unfortunately, such an event was not uncommon with slaves. Because slaves were treated as property rather than people, slave families were often separated to prevent a human bond between them, which would likely interfere with the ordering of harsh, strenuous work and even harsher punishments. Additionally, Douglass mentions the fact that slaves were to know as little of themselves as possible, in order to preserve them as property, born not to think or feel but to work. In the masters' eyes, this would have likely had slaves see the world as one to work on, and so that is exactly what they would do. Of course, slaves eventually did rebel against their masters and go to every length to de...
Post a Comment
Read more