BEYOND THE VERSE: POETIC NARRATIVITY AS A HALLMARK OF POE’S IDIONARRATION

Abstract

This article revisits the well-established debate over Poe’s literary identity by suggesting that viewing him as either a poet or a prose writer limits a full understanding of his style. Instead, the study approaches Poe through the concept of “poetics”, which unites his poetry and prose within a single aesthetic system. Building on our previous research on Poe’s idiolect, idiostyle, and idionarration, we examine the poeticalness of his prose and introduce poetic narrativity as a defining characteristic of his poetics. Based on Jakobson’s concept of the poetic function, Mukařovský’s theory of foregrounding, and Yemets’s conception of poetic prose, we develop a “Checklist on prose poeticalness” comprising four criteria: rhythmization through syntactic, phonological, and semantic parallelism; grammatical and graphological deviation; text fragmentation resembling poetic stanzas; and stylistic convergence. The checklist is applied to three of Poe’s short stories: “Lionizing” (1835), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), and “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” (1845). The analysis demonstrates that all these texts systematically employ repetitive syntactic structures, sound patterning, unconventional punctuation, italics, codemixing, and fragmented textual organisation. The convergence of these foregrounding devices produces rhythmic, aesthetically intensified prose that exhibits distinctly poetic qualities. Their recurrence across works from different periods confirms that such techniques are not isolated stylistic experiments but stable features of Poe’s. The findings show that the principles governing Poe’s poetry also organise his prose, revealing the transgeneric nature of his poetics. Consequently, poetic prose is regarded as one of the core characteristics of Poe’s idionarration.