Prose poets

[heslopian]

British Authors Before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary said of 18th-century Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe that "her prose was poetry and her poetry was prose. She was, indeed, a prose poet, in both the best and the worst senses of the phrase. The romantic landscape, the background, is the best thing in all her books; the characters are two dimensional, the plots far fetched and improbable, with 'elaboration of means and futility of result.'"

Are there any writers whom you like more for their language than their plots? More pertinently, what distinguishes a prose poem from a verse poem? Is it length, rhythm, narrative, vocabulary, etc.?


Ann Radcliffe approves this thread.