Title: “Prose Poetry: Between Acceptance and Rejection

Abstract

Prose poetry has sparked extensive debate in the Arab creative arena since its emergence, with proponents and opponents. We should not ignore that some Arab studies attempted to codify and theorize prose poetry in Arabic literature through its primary reference, Susan Berner’s book titled “Prose Poetry from Baudelaire to Our Days.” Since then, prose poetry has become a genuine call for a new poetic reality. It penetrated the poetic scene, asserting its dominance in the late seventies and early eighties of the last century. It opened new horizons for language itself and sparked widespread debate in literary circles. Its advocates worked to theorize it as a distinct form compared to traditional poetic forms, abandoning the sacred elements of Arabic poetry such as meter and rhyme. This stirred a broad discussion among critics that persists to this day. With the emergence of modernist poetic movements, the literary community divided into two camps: one supportive and the other opposed, leading to a sharp conflict between innovators and traditionalists that continues in the literary arena to this day. Within the ongoing debate about prose poetry, researchers and poets have varied in their positions regarding its nomenclature, with both supporters and opponents. Our research, titled “Prose Poetry: Between Acceptance and Rejection,” is an attempt to investigate and understand prose poetry, its origins, characteristics, citing relevant poems on the research topic.