Work in prose that has some of the technical or literary qualities of poetry (such as regular rhythm, definitely patterned structure, or emotional or imaginative heightening) but that is set on a page as prose .
The form took its name from Charles Baudelaire 's Little Poems in Prose (1869). Other writers of prose poems include, in the 19th century, Stéphane Mallarmé , Arthur Rimbaud , Friedrich Hölderlin , Novalis , and Rainer Maria Rilke , and in the 20th, Amy Lowell (in her "polyphonic prose") and such contemporary poets as John Ashbery .