A Purposeful Preference for Prose

Oh My!

I said the other day, in passing, that I really don’t like poetry. That’s probably an odd stance for someone who loves literature, writes books, and has a deep affection for word origins. I get that my disdain for it is weird.

I have a good friend, a college English professor I’ve known for 38 years. We still talk every week. He’s one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever known. He was flabbergasted when I admitted I really don’t care for poetry.

Being as much a music aficionado as a literature one, he went straight to the hill I knew he’d die on: music lyrics. I was already prepared for this. Music is mathematics. It has a structure you need to follow. The poetry of musical lyrics works because it obeys that structure. It’s a necessary component of the medium, and I accept that.

He tried to argue, “What about jazz?” — implying it doesn’t follow math in the same way. I don’t agree. Jazz absolutely follows a mathematical structure. Ironically, jazz may be to music what good poetry might be to literature: Even when it improvises, jazz still returns to form and remains disciplined within the structure. Without that, it’s just noise.

Of course, he then moved to the next stop in our planned excursion into debate (something we’re well known for) and brought up the classics: Beowulf, Homer, and Shakespeare.

He knows I once performed in the play Frogs, where Shakespeare and Shaw are in Hades together, debating the theme of love, with Dionysus as the judge. The rule was that they could only quote from their own work. Shakespeare quoted from memory. Shaw had to bring two assistants on stage to pore over his voluminous publications for counterarguments. He knows I love Shakespeare.

Two-Part Test

These works were written in poetic form for two reasons: memorization and performance. With Beowulf and Homer, poetry was a tool — a way to aid memorization and carry stories across generations through the oral tradition. And with Shakespeare, the poetry was performative. It had rhythm and beauty, yes, but it also served story. His verse carried real plots, real tension, real character arcs. He was a master of the craft, not just of language, but of storytelling through language.

The discussion led me to this proposition: words are tools to communicate meaning. If I’m going to judge poetry (for myself, your mileage may vary), there is a two-part test: communication and meaning.

Communication

Does the structure of poetry lend itself to communication? The answer is that yes, it certainly can in the oral form. In oral form, the structure of poetry can aid in memorization (for instance, oral traditions and music lyrics) and it can also serve as a locomotive force, pulling the story along. Poetry, then, has a functional value in the oral form. It’s a mnemonic device that serves the function of communicating in a performative art. So, the first test for me, is this:

Does this particular poem serve the function of communicating better than prose?

And there are instances that it can and does do that. It tends to be easier to remember song lyrics, or a haiku, or a limerick than it does to remember a paragraph of Hemingway prose. So yes, as a functional tool, performative poetry can communicate in ways that prose cannot.

Thus, if you’ve mastered the craft, stayed within the structure, and used it in a narrow performative way, poetry’s communication structure can be better. But if you forego the structure, which a lot of modern poetry does, that function is not only lost, but diminishes communication as the human mind seeks to find a pattern that is not actually there. In so doing, the meaning of the words is often lost.

But, here’s the catch: aside from music, mostly it’s not better than prose in reality. The bar is much higher. Average prose communicates better than average poetry. Bad prose can still communicate, whereas bad poetry is just nonsense. And in written form, poetry is never better than prose as a communication tool.

There is a narrow functional margin where poetry is a better communication tool. But mostly, it’s not. The oral tradition has faded, performance is niche, and the written page tilts the field to prose. Poetry’s got potential, but it’s not clearing the bar often enough to matter.

Meaning

The next question is, does the poetry form enhance or diminish meaning? Does the medium communicate meaning better than prose? If it’s not better than prose at communicating meaning, then does it at least not diminish meaning?

By meaning, I am referring to intellectual meaning (ideas, logic, clarity), emotional meaning (feeling, resonance, impact), and sensory meaning (hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling).

Intellectual Meaning

Clearly, poetry can communicate these things because it can use all the same words that prose can use. But as soon as you come to this realization, it strikes you that it must communicate the same meaning as prose within the limitations of structure. Prose also has a structure, but it is far less limiting.

By default, prose communicates intellectual meaning better in nearly all instances. Masters of the poetry craft can equal prose, but I very much doubt it can ever exceed prose on an intellectual level.

Emotional Meaning

Both prose and poetry can be good at communicating emotional meaning, and they can also be poor, depending on the wielder of the paintbrush. There are times in performative poetry that emotional meaning is portrayed better.

Musical lyrics are an example, but I would argue that when they are removed from the song, they don’t carry the same emotional meaning, which suggests that it is the combination of music and lyrics that carry the emotional meaning bucket together. Most lyrics are inane and repetitive. They don’t tend to stand alone when extracted from the music and the vocals.

This is not dissimilar to films, which generally are a performative prose medium. Remove the action, the score, the actor, and the performance, and the words themselves lose much of the emotional meaning from the scene.

In my view, poetry and prose are both able to communicate emotional meaning equally. I call it a draw.

Sensory Meaning

Here, there is no question that the poetry form is inferior to prose in describing sensory details to the reader or listener. Poetry can do it, but it cannot do it as well. The form itself limits the scope of telling such that sensory details or story tend to be sacrificed in favor of the other. A master poet can do it, of course, but we’re back to the high bar problem. Average prose communicates sensory details better than average poetry.

And so…

Poetry quite simply is a lesser tool for conveying meaning. A master in the craft can achieve the same level of meaning, but that’s very rare, and mostly poets do not achieve what prose can achieve.

The result is that poetry tends to fail compared to prose, especially in the hands of journeyman poets compared to their prose counterparts.

It’s the High Bar

So then, another friend offered a counter I wasn’t quite ready to dismiss: maybe I don’t dislike poetry. Maybe I just don’t like poetry that’s not good. I think he’s right, and I’ve reflected on that since — and I’ll concede the point. I don’t like poetry that’s not good.

But then again, I don’t like prose that’s not good either. So it’s not just about bad writing. There has to be more to it than that. I’m not anti-poetry so much as skeptical of poetry that lacks either function (as in oral tradition or performance) or depth (real characters, real stakes).

I would argue that nearly all modern poetry lacks both.

It often abandons structure — not just meter or rhyme, but any kind of internal rhythm or architectural discipline. Furthermore, unless it’s meant for memorization and the oral tradition, what is the functional point?

Modern poetry rarely tells a story, and when it does, it doesn’t tell it as well as prose. Too often, in trying to adhere to a structure, poets choose the wrong word — a word that fits the meter but only loosely fits the meaning. Clarity is sacrificed. The poem bends toward sound or rhythm and away from sense.

Rather than admitting this, the poet tries to hide behind a supposed esoteric mystery. It pretends to reflect Churchill’s commentary on Russia (“a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”), but I see through the smoke and mirrors. Shakespeare, by contrast, was nearly always clear. Even within the strictest constraints of verse, he chose words that served both the structure and the story.

I just don’t see modern poets achieving that. Modern poetry, it seems, often revels in fragmentation — in being cryptic for the sake of being cryptic. It aims for feeling over meaning, and too often ends up with neither.

I’m not saying it’s all bad. I’m saying I don’t know what to do with it. If I read a poem and feel nothing, learn nothing, and can’t trace a shape through it — I’m left cold. And I’ve been left cold a lot by the medium.

I don't like the abstraction, the poor word choice, and the pretentiousness that comes from trying to fit inside a mathematical structure. It can be done, of course, but the bar is much higher than for prose, and we’re not reaching it.

If I ever find myself back in a hippie bar, listening to some man-bun-wearing dude reciting poetry he typed on a vintage manual in a Starbucks sipping an $18-worth of lattes while unraveling the evils of proto-capitalism, please do me a favor and remind me to punch myself in the face.

I don’t need poseurs performing for the sake of performance. Shakespeare never did that. His work was about performance for the sake of story, and there is a very significant difference. I want clarity and purpose and meaning—and poetry today just doesn’t seem to have that.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I just don’t get it. But I did get Shakespeare. I got Homer.

Looking for Answers

I had a discussion with ChatGPT about this and said, prove I’m wrong, give me some modern poetry that achieves one or the other or both things I’m looking for (function and/or story). It suggested three:

• Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden (1962)

• The Truly Great by Stephen Spender (1933)

• On Turning Ten by Billy Collins (1995)

I read them. The Hayden piece had a good first phrase and then fell apart after the second phrase and I couldn’t be bothered to read the rest of it. I read the whole of the Spender piece. The first stanza was great. The second was poor. The third almost did enough to recover the poem, but not quite. For the Collins bit, I liked almost the whole thing, but the last stanza stopped being a story and turned to navel gazing, which ruined the whole experience for me. They were just okay. Collins was the best, but it still would have just been better and clearer as prose.

So then I went to Grok with this complaint and it gave me others to look at, and it proposed poets like Tongo Eisen-Martin, Danez Smith, and Abu Toha. I read them. All of them fail at the functional part of poetry. There is no performative value to the form.

So this leaves me to consider only the storytelling value of poetry. But they also failed at that. Instead of stories, they were social commentaries: the urban struggle, racial reckoning, and the applicability of labels on people. It’s okay for them to go hard on commentary, but they’re not telling tales. They’re preaching, and I’m not here for sermons. While I can see that certain segments of society may appreciate the social commentary that these poets aim for, I don’t find it particularly interesting, although I accept that this is a subjective concern.

Bland and Boring

For me, there are so many better stories in prose that I have not gotten to yet that I cannot be bothered to wade through the mountains of bad poetry to maybe find one or two pieces that capture function and story (or at least one of those). Everyone wants to point me to their favorite, but when I read them, I’m just not impressed.

I realize this stance won’t sit well with everyone, but that’s okay. I understand why. Poetry has this unearned, weird, protected, almost sacred status. But I strongly feel it’s like a football team that won the first nine championships in a row centuries ago, has done nothing since, and its new players are just coasting on the fame of the foundational players.

Today, poetry is treated as if it’s automatically more profound because of the line breaks — but when you strip away the format and ask, “Would this be better just told plainly?” — the answer, is nearly always yes.

The point of language is to communicate meaning. If you’re not doing that, then what’s the point other than preening? Mostly, I think that poets are just trying too hard to be clever, mostly failing, and mostly boring. I’d rather gouge my eyes out than read boring poetry; which sadly, is almost all of it.

Poetry

So, naturally, I need to end this with a poem called Poetry. It goes like this:

Poe Try
Poe Fail
Second Try
No Avail
Rhyme bends
Sense breaks
Form ends
Heart fakes

—Stephen B. Anthony

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