Isaiah Langford - The Poetic & Prosaic as Distinct from Poetry & Prose through the Lens of Scripture - 2/27/2026

  In our discussion in part surrounding artifacts, we talked about the poetic and the prosaic as modes of language/communication. The poetic is the natural, creative sense of language that we inherently experience as the first, primordial sense, whereas the prosaic concerns the empirical and exact form of explanation or definition; the prosaic comes from our experience of language as it has been constructed and formally used. These modes of thought, as language itself is a method for solidifying thought, can be connected to the two main ways that we communicate in the written word, namely, prose and poetry. However, these distinctions do not necessarily correlate, and an example of such non-relationship can be found in the Hebrew Bible. Books like Psalms and the Song of Solomon may be characterized as “pure poetry,” but many interpretations of the creation account provided in Genesis lend it a poetic interpretation, even though in its text it is a prose piece. The structure of the narrative folds in on itself, as the first three days are spent forming space from the void through separation (light and darkness, sea and sky, land and water) and the second set of three days are spent filling the new places by immediate creation (sun and moon, birds and water creatures, man and land animals). Even though our modern rendering of these texts present them as narrative stories, they can be better conceptualized as epic poems. And in other portions of the Hebrew Bible, the intent of the narratives is to lend a poetic rather than prosaic understanding of the situation; because these stories started as oral tradition, it makes sense that they would originally retain the structure of oral stories even as they were later written down and amended. Furthermore, perhaps because they are all written down, these stories lack the true essence of the poetic mode, even those parts like Psalms and the Song of Songs which are in the structure of a poem. I think it is very interesting that although we can make a distinction between the prosaic and poetic modes, this does not necessitate their connection to prose and poetry and styles of writing, but rather opens a new window to interpreting the underlying intent of the author and from where their written experience flows.