The Centaur & The Bacchante

Maurice de Guerin’s The Centaur and The Bacchante represent two of the earliest examples of the prose poem. Both pieces are heavily centered in classical Greek mythology, and are deeply entrenched in the natural world. Each piece has its narrator relate in luscious, sustained and highly charged prose their life stories. And both narratives are inextricably wedded to the mountains, hills, valleys and sea. Written in the mid-1830s by de Guerin, these pieces serve as a contrast against Louis Bertrand’s quick narrative sketches that many readers most often associate with the prose poem. De Guerin’s pieces present an alternative approach wherein the suppleness and cadences of poetic potential of prose are realized in another, higher sense.