The literati shouldn’t be apologetic about prose for prose too, like poetry, can string the best words in the best order
As darkness threatened to take the dale under its downy plumes anytime, I sat on the easy chair in my portico looking at the sylvan glade whose lush green was commingling with the crepuscular gray. My little home sits on the footsteps of a knoll hard by a precipitous gorge which rolls down further and unfolds into an expansive and lush woods. Further up, the verdure climbs over the banks of a steep hill where billows of fog swaddles them with ghostly caresses. Somewhere at the bottom, invisible from my home, runs a submontane stream with obstreperous cataracts; the distant rapids hum in a perennial sibilant susurrus day or night. It rained all evening — the sodden air breezed with brumal pleasantry and the leaves dropped doddering diamonds. Quietude cleaved her way into this landscape interwoven with the bustle of the stream and the song of the crickets. Rainy season had set in.
All my working life, I had dreamed about an idyllic retreat to live a life of aureate silence away from the discordance and disjunction of the masses. I stretched my legs in front of me, put my arms behind my head, breathed in the taste of greenness, and lost myself to the fructuous moment when the rumbling of a thunder from the distant purlieus rolled onto the deeps and echoed from the knoll opposite. This was life. In its essence. At this very moment. At once energizing and elevating the aestivating strings of the human soul.
Sublime poetry alone can versify this awakening and the versifiers must need be great bards delivering their bravura. As Voltaire observes, “One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.” As I savored that twilight, I sensed poetry flying in and laying its apocryphal claim to reify my experience as a matter of course. I reflect on Francine Prose’s apothegm, in prose or poetry, “words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted”. This leads me to posit that prose can indeed, through its luminosity and plenitude, carry any weight of literary burden with aplomb and that a dilettante can blemish poetry just as prose. Pockmarked prose must be the artist’s fault, not the pen’s. S.T. Coleridge may swoon over “Poetry: the best words in the best order,” but I cannot fathom why prose too cannot manifest the same. The radiance of le mots justes cannot be corralled onto a private demesne.
Poetry cocoons itself in the bosom of the urbane and suave connoisseurs that are free from the drudgery of everyday life to which the prose patron, impoverished of cosmopolitanism and debonairness but not of culture or refinement, often is manacled to. On the other hand, prose hotfooted it to the vanguard of discourse in fiction and nonfiction in no small measure augmented by the fecundity of contemporary human endeavors, most of which do not readily lend themselves to the charms of poetry. The lettered crowd can read oodles which is safe enough, but it can also write oodles which is not the same. Anyone can write but not everyone that writes is a writer. While anyone can write prose, good prose belongs to artists with initiative and best prose to the inkdom of a genius. On the flip side, bad prose belongs to amateurs and worst prose to typists.
Francis Bacon, the father of empiricism, opined “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.” That is, one who does not read stays incomplete irrespective of one’s achievements. Despite the exhortation, the lack of substantive reading (or the copious reading of the same kind neither elevating nor transforming) countervails the plenitude of writing today. The nonreaders must apportion their limited time to the worship of a plethora of modern gods. By “conference maketh a ready man” Francis Bacon refers to the mental agility of one in discoursing on a matter of substantial public interest. The public sparring of thoughts and ideas proves to be the apt nutriment for the hungry mind. The absence of discourse, abetted in no small measure by the lack of reading and awareness, stultifies the evolution of the human thought beyond the tacky tropes. Is not it unsurprising the volume and the level of public discourse seek the low grounds? One avoids a discussion rather than discuss difficult topics civil and courteous. Ultimately, “writing maketh an exact man.” That is, one must make notes for memory is such a fickle thing. One’s notes gives one the confidence and comfort in exerting with accuracy and exactitude. Cast off the wariness of the mind debilitated by vagueness and doubt and assert your point with courage in speech and writing. Bolster your writing with infallible data because “the details are the life of it” (Jack Kerouac). One will do well to remember “poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince” (H.L. Mencken). Impossible to convince it will be if one reads not, conferences not, and writes not.
To whom the appellation “the father of English prose” belongs to is in some dispute being dependent upon the time, context, and person. 16th-century William Tyndale’s prose makes him the prime candidate for the above title — three quarters of the King James Version of the Bible come from Tyndale’s translations. His impact on society and its language through his Biblical prose goes much farther than the inadequate inquiry into it suggests. But Tyndale faces competition from John Wycliffe of 14th century — an English philosopher, theologian, priest, and Bible translator. Moreover, “The Canterbury Tales” of the 14th century, a collection of 24 stories in more than 17,000 lines, confers on Geoffrey Chaucer the rightful title “the father of English poetry”; of note, “The Tales” contains a prose section. However, his facility with verse eclipses his achievement with mundane prose. Furthermore, eminent prose writes such as King Alfred the Great, Sir Francis Bacon, and Sir John Mandeville too can claim not without justice to the above title.
How will these founding fathers of prose react to the attribution made to prose by contemporary society and formalized in modern lexicography? If the adjective form of “prose” is “prosaic” and the dictionary by Merriam-Webster says it refers to the “dull, unimaginative, everyday, ordinary,” one can rest assure the fury of the founding fathers in their graves. The insult passes without a crumb of comment. The same dictionary has no entry for “versaic” — instead it lists adjectives such as poetic, poetical, bardic, lyric, lyrical, and poeticized with factual and nonjudgmental meanings. However, “poetical” delivers a sense of “being beyond or above the truth of history or nature” — otherwise “idealized.” Hence, in “had poetical ideas about love,” “poetical” catapults the earthly “ideas” to sublimity.
Confusion reigns when people or things forgot their places. Poetry — the language of the heart, prose — the language of the mind. Poetry gushes passion and enthusiasm, prose sketches rational emotion. Poetry inspires, prose convinces. As Franz Grillparzer opines, “Prose talks and poetry sings.” Poetry seeks to elevate the human experience and send it scudding with the ethereal clouds. “To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary” to quote Edgar Allan Poe; he adds in his essay “The Poetic Principle” that he “would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.” Prose mirrors human talk and reflects reality — it must authenticate, validate, and sanity check itself so that it can convince in both fiction and nonfiction (although, the difference between these two seems to blur in the postmodern zeitgeist, but this is a topic for a separate rant). Poetry makes rhythm, rhyme, and cadence its trademark and prose lays claim to the expansive domains of logic, common sense, and rationale. Nevertheless, prose too can bear beauty and joy with as much facility as poetry and as much flexibility as allowed for by its syntax. “There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm” says Edgar Allan Poe and I will say this for both prose and poetry. S.T. Coleridge buttresses this through “Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm” and “What comes from the heart, goes to the heart.” After all, one must “always be a poet, even in prose” (Charles Baudelaire). Remember “Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose” (Walter Savage Landor). In the end, all art must stand together each certain of its place and utility — no one espouses this better than Gunter Grass, “Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.” A true artist must only be a votary of this democratic maxim because “an artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one” (Charles Cooley).
I see poem and prose and art and music and color filled to life’s gunwales and wonder how one can be partial to one heart beat over another for those are verily our heart beats. I had to stop now as darkness swooped down the valley and the chill gnawed at my bones. The racket of the pigeons and hornbills beneath the forest canopy disturbed my reverie. The landscape was lost to me and the world with it except for the distant gurgling of the stream and the indistinct chant of the bugs. I went into the living room, drew the curtains over misted window panes, and fired up the room heater. The golden tenor of the room lighted by the sodium-vapor lamp radiated the twinkles of a thousand distant stars in this recluse’s room. It was then I sat on the wicker swing with my journal to set forth my thoughts in the “prosaic” style I love so much.
