Cole himself is a distinguished and successful poet, though not quite a household name (in the limited sense that any contemporary poets are household names). Henri Cole‘s Orphic Parisis a fine book of poet’s prose, consisting of brief essays originally published in The New Yorker.
When poets write prose, then, they are taking advantage of the instrumentality of the medium to do something that they can’t quite do in their poetry: tell a story, flesh out a character, make an argument. Paul Valéry, the great French poet and critic, famously remarked that “poetry is to prose what dancing is to walking.” His point was that poetry and prose are both forms of writing, but that their use of language is fundamentally different - one of them is artistic and the other is instrumental.
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