Prose poetry was consciously written by Lord Beaconsfield, who tells us in the early preface to his novel, Alroy, that he was trying to write rhythmical prose poetry in that novel. He did not always succeed, but throughout all his novels are found many excellent prose poems. He was writing prose poetry in the early eighteen thirties before Baudelaire, and in some of his tales, like Pompanilla, we have prose poems. He often became bombastic, but he was a poet, nevertheless.
Later English critics have returned to the subject of prose poetry.
In his Aspects of Poetry Professor John C. Shairp says that he grants "that the old limits between prose and poetry tend to disappear." He concludes his book with two chapters on prose poets, on Carlyle and Newman. And Courthope, worshipper of metre that he is, concludes his History of English Poetry with a chapter on the poetry in the Waverly Novels. We also recall that Bagehot could see little difference between Tennyson's novels in verse and George Eliot's novels in prose.
A great critic like Pater maintained the rights of the poet in prose. In his essay on Style he said "Prose will exert in due measure all the varied charms of poetry down to the rhythm which, as in Cicero, Michelet, or Newman, gives its musical value to every syllable."
The first lengthy and systematic plea for prose poetry I know of in English, outside of Disraeli's and De Quincey's modest apologies for writing in this manner,
was made by David Masson in an essay on Prose and Verse: De Quincey, published as a review of De Quincey in 1854. De Quincey's preface, pleading for impassioned prose, suggested Masson's essay. Masson had, however, dwelt on the poetic side of prose the year before in an article on Dallas's Poetics, called Theories of Poetry. Both of Masson's essays are to be found in his Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Other Essays. Masson very ingeniously asks why we are not allowed to write prose in the manner that Milton writes in verse, or in the manner of Æschylus in prose translation. He concludes that poetry and prose are not two entirely separate spheres, but intersecting and penetrating. To-day we go even farther than Masson and urge that prose, except in short lyrics when verse may be used, should be the sole language of passion and the imagination. He vindicates De Quincey's right to use impassioned prose; he quotes as an example of prose poetry a beautiful passage from the conclusion of Milton's pamphlet, Causes That Have Hindered the Reformation in England, and mentions especially Jean Paul Richter, the prose poet who was responsible for the prose poetry of two disciples, De Quincey and Carlyle. Richter's Christ and the Universe is highly regarded by him as prose poetry.
Masson's prediction that the time was coming when the best prose should more resemble verse than it had done in the past, and that the best verse should not disdain a certain resemblance to prose, is being fulfilled. Remember Masson wrote before the Leaves of Grass appeared, and before the vogue of free verse.
Yet his viewpoint was severely criticized by a scholar like John Earle, whose English Prose contains an attack on prose poetry. Earle says that prose poetry is found chiefly in ages of literary decadence like the Latin
Silver Age in writers from Tacitus to Boethius. On the contrary, it is found as well in the golden ages of literature, as, for example, in Sidney's Arcadia, which he himself quotes from, in Plato, in Pascal, in Dante's prose. It is strange that this view of Earle's should still largely prevail. Poetry and prose are still regarded by academic scholars like Earle, Saintsbury, Courthope, Bosanquet Watts-Dunton and Gummere as two distinct branches of literature. Earle is right only when he objects to the clichés of verse in prose, but to-day we object to all clichés.
Poetic prose, however, should not be used on every occasion, but only when an ecstasy is to be expressed. And, above all, it should be avoided—and this is how prose poetry got into disrepute—in expressing sentimental emotions, commonplace ideas, and the merely popular. When we read in eloquent prose, the grand eulogies on the flag, on the purity and redeeming virtues of mother-love, on the dignity of toil, on the glory of dying for one's country, on the goodness of God, etc., themes which have been celebrated so often that they are nauseous to us because nothing new is said, then we see how ridiculous prose poetry may become.