What is a prose work? The difference between the poem and the prose work

About what a prose work is, it is customary to speak only against the background of its difference from the text of a poetic one, however, strange as it may seem, with obvious clarity of the difference between the verse text and the prosaic text, what exactly is this difference, what are the specifics of the verses and Prose, why these two kinds of speech exist is rather difficult.

The problems of distinguishing between prose and verse

Modern literary criticism, studying the difference between a poem and a prose work, poses the following curious questions:

1. Which speech is more natural for culture: poetic or prosaic?
2. What is a prose work against a verse?
3. What are the clear criteria for distinguishing the verse and prose text?
4. Due to what resources does the prose text turn into a poetic text?
5. How deep is the difference between poetic and prosaic speech? Is it limited to the organization of speech or to the system of thinking?

What is primary: verses or prose?

The writer and literary critic Jan Parandovsky, reflecting on what a prose work is, once remarked that there is no scientific evidence that mankind at first spoke in verse, not prose, but in the sources of the literature of different countries is poetic rather than prosaic speech . This was due to the fact that it was the verse that first rose above everyday speech and the verse speech reached its perfection long before the first attempts at artistic prose appeared.

Jan Parandovsky a little cunning, because in fact there is a lot of scientific hypotheses, based on the assumption that initially human speech was poetic. About this, and J. Vico, and G. Gadamer, and M. Shapir. But Parandovsky clearly noted one thing: world literature really begins with poetry, and not with prose. Genres of prose works developed later genres of poems.

Why exactly there was a verse speech, while precisely it is not known. Perhaps this is due to the idea of the general rhythm of the human body and the world around him, possibly with the initial rhythm of children's speech (which, in turn, awaits an explanation).

Criteria for distinguishing between verse and prose

Famous poet Mikhail Gasparov saw the difference between the poem and the prose work, that the poetic text is felt as a text of increased importance and is intended for repetition and memorization. The poetic text, in addition to the fact that it is divided into sentences and parts of sentences, is also divided into parts that are easily grasped by consciousness.

This observation is inherently very deep, but it is not instrumental, since it does not prescribe clear criteria for distinguishing between verse and prose. After all, prose can also be of increased importance and can also be calculated for memorization.

Formal features of the difference between prose and verse text

Formal features of the difference - short fragments of the sentence - can not be recognized as sufficient grounds. AG Mashevsky notes that in fact, in verse, you can even turn an article from a newspaper, simply dividing its proposals into fragments of different lengths and writing each of them from a new line.

However, it will be too noticeable that the sentences are divided conditionally, no additional meaning is attached to this division, except for a humorous or ironic sound.

Thus, the differences between prose and poetry do not consist in any one feature, but suggest some profound differences. To understand what a prose work is, you need to know that prose and verse texts are subject to different laws of organization of the text and the orderliness of its elements.

The word in verse and in prose

It so happened that traditionally prose is defined through its difference from verse. It is more common to talk not about the distinctive features of prose in comparison with verse, but on the contrary - about the difference between poetry and prose.

So, about the word in the verse Russian literary critic Yu. N. Tynyanov said that it is closer than in prose, connected with other words in the work, and even its connection with the design as a whole, he called it "the law of unity and closeness of the verse series" , And this concept is relevant for literary studies so far.

Two trends in resolving the issue

Modern science has made many attempts to formulate what a prose work is in contrast to a poetic work, and in these attempts two distinct trends can be discerned distinctly. A number of philologists believe that the most important criterion is the specificity of the sound of the text. This approach can be called phonetic. In the vein of this tradition of understanding prose and verse, VM Zhirmunsky also expressed himself, according to which the difference between verse speech lies in the "regular ordering of the sound form". However, unfortunately, or fortunately, not all prosaic and poetic works clearly differ from each other phonetically.

In contrast to this tradition, graphic theory insists on the primacy of the nature of the recording of a work. If the record is ordered as a verse (written "in a column," then the work is poetic, if the text is written "in line", then it is prosaic). In line with this hypothesis, the modern poeticist Yu. B. Orlitsky is working. However, this criterion is not enough. As already mentioned above, a newspaper text written "in a column" does not become poetic from this. Pushkin's prosaic works, recorded as poems, will not become poetic from this.

Thus, we must recognize that there are no external, formal criteria for the difference between prosaic and poetic texts. These differences are deep and touch both the sound, and grammatical, and intonational, and genre nature of the work.