'The term ‘prose poetry’ would seem to be an oxymoron, yet the form has been around a long time. Perhaps most notably, Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en Prose (1869) set the form firmly in the modernist poet’s range of technical options for exploring language and what it can do. In general, line breaks matter in poetry, and lines comprise the most obvious compositional or structural units of poems. Indeed, for most traditional forms of English poetry, rhyme and meter are inextricably linked to lines, as in iambic pentameters, for example. In free verse, line breaks structure language in ways that can enhance, replace, or even run counter to an underlying framework of grammar and punctuation. Line breaks obviously affect the appearance of a poem on the page and they can strongly influence how a poem is read aloud.' (Introduction)
