This spring, after the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded to a volume of prose—Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End—an open letter questioning the legitimacy of the award was sent to the Pulitzer Board Written by the poet Louis Simpson, this letter raises an issue which we believe to be important.
The issue is whether a prize specifically designated in the official “provisions” of the Pulitzer Prizes “for a distinguished volume of verse by an American author” can be legit imately conferred upon a volume of prose. The implied insult to the art of verse is unmistakable in this blatant repudiation of the regulation governing the award, and it is an insult made all the more galling by the fact that the Pulitzer Prizes are, by the terms of the will of the first Joseph Pulitzer, administered by Columbia University. In condoning the award, Columbia has lent whatever remains of its intellectual authority in these matters to an historic oblit eration of the distinction traditionally made between verse and prose.
Mr. Simpson’s open letter to the Pulitzer Prize board reads as follows:
This year a Pulitzer Prize was awarded for a book of “prose poems.” No award was made for verse. Does not a rule of the Pulitzer Prizes state that the prize for poetry is to be awarded for a book of verse? Has the rule been changed? If so, readers and writers of verse would like to know why. If it has not been changed, the Board appears to have been irresponsible.
Have you thought of the consequence of awarding the prize for verse to a book of prose? If in the future a publisher submits a book of short stories for the prize in poetry, a book of essays, a “poetic” biography or history, on what grounds will you say that it is ineligible?
There are several Pulitzer Prizes for prose. You have taken the one prize that was open to writers of verse and awarded that also to a book of prose. You have, in fact, eliminated the prize for verse.
Why?
In a letter responding to this complaint, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, Robert C. Christopher, readily acknowledged that Mr. Simpson was entirely correct in saying the Pulitzer Plan for Award states that the prize shall be awarded to “a distinguished volume of verse.” Mr. Christopher pointed out, however, that it has been the practice of the Pulitzer board to describe the award as one for poetry rather than for verse, and that “prose poems” have long been a “recognized form.” Presumably, Mr. Christopher does not go so far as to claim that prose poems are a recognized form of verse.
He also points out that the Pulitzer board attaches “great weight” to the recommendations of its advisory committee on poetry, which this year consisted of Helen Vendler, Garrett Hongo, and Charles Wright. This committee is reported to have recommended three “finalists” for this year’s Pulitzer award, and we may be fairly confident that the two who lost out were represented by volumes of verse.
The resulting decision to bypass the art of verse in favor of a book of prose cannot be regarded as an innocent one.
The resulting decision to bypass the art of verse in favor of a book of prose cannot be regarded as an innocent one. Everyone who follows these matters knows that the crucial issue in poetry today involves an argument about form—about the use or rejection of metrical structures in the writing of poetry. What has been described in these pages as “metrical illiteracy” has long made a good deal of what passes for American poetry a literary wasteland. That this phenomenon of metrical illiteracy has been tolerated and even encouraged by university writing programs is also well known. By lending its weight to the destructive side of this debate about poetic form, the Pulitzer board has not only subverted the provisions of its award for verse but has done considerable harm to the art of poetry. Surely this was not what the Pulitzer Prize was originally intended to do.
