Polyphonic Prose

Amy Lowell was the imagist poet who was most heavily influenced by the practice of polyphonic prose, a term coined by Fletcher (who also enjoyed using this technique), but a practice that Lowell learned from the French poet Paul Fort (1872-1960). Lowell interpreted this form to be similar to free verse but only freer. She called it the most elastic form of poetic expression, as it used all the poetic "voices" such as meter, cadence, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. When writing in this form, the poem is printed out in prose form, but the sound of the writing reflects the modes of poetry.

Lowell described this technique in an essay she wrote, "A Consideration of Modern Poetry," for the North American Review (January 1917). She employed this technique for the first time in her collection Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), to which Aldington wrote an article in the...