The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem

£12.99

Jeremy Noel-Tod

The prose poem has proven one of the most innovative and versatile poetic forms of recent years. In the century-and-a-half since Charles Baudelaire, Emma Lazarus, Oscar Wilde and Ivan Turgenev spread the notion of a new kind of poetry, this ‘genre with an oxymoron for a name’ has attracted and beguiled many of our most beloved writers. Yet, even now, this peculiarly rich and expansive form can strike many readers as something of a mystery. Here, Jeremy Noel-Tod reconstructs the history of the prose poem for us by selecting the essential pieces of writing – by turns luminous, brooding, lamentatory and comic – which have defined and developed it at each stage, covering a greater chronological sweep and international range than any previous anthology of this kind.

In stock

Description

‘A wonderful book – an invigorating revelation … An essential collection of prose poems from across the globe, by old masters and new, reveals the form’s astonishing range’ Kate Kellaway, Observer

‘A superb anthology . . . it is hard to know how it could possibly be bettered’ Daily Telegraph

This is the prose poem: a ‘genre with an oxymoron for a name’, one of literature’s great open secrets, and the home for over 150 years of extraordinary work by many of the world’s most beloved writers. This uniquely wide-ranging anthology gathers essential pieces of writing from every stage of the form’s evolution, beginning with the great flowering of recent years before moving in reverse order through the international experiments of the 20th century and concluding with the prose poem’s beginnings in 19th-century France.

Edited with an introduction by Jeremy Noel-Tod

Additional information

Weight 348 g
Dimensions 19.8 × 12.9 × 2.6 cm
Author

Publisher

Penguin Classics

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

496

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

808.81 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K