With its very title and its form based on contradiction, the prose poem is suitable to an extraordinary range of perception and expression, from the ambivalent (in content as in form) to the mimetic and the narrative (or even anecdotal). It has been suggested that the prose poem, like it's not-so-distant cousin, free verse, as born in France out of a sense of frustration with the strict rules of 18th-century French neoclassicism. If so, these rules are to be thanked since the prose poem occasions even now a rapidly increasing interest. For the vast majority of poets and critics, its principal characteristics are those that would insure unity even in epiphanic brevity and poetic quality even without the line breaks of free verse: high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition, sustained intensity, and compactness.