POETRY’S change became an emphasis on narrative description outside the traditional, or typical, structure of prose. The unit of this change, of course, is the poetic line or sentence, which, though it might bear the same descriptive intention as in prose, is “Constantly in the strange process of self interruption, its pause at the end of each line” as Helen Vengler wrote in her introduction to ‘The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry’.

Prose/poetry fusion

What the purists of literature react against is the blurring of the borderline between poetry and prose, and vice versa, which is encouraged by narrative description. And which prose writer’s name should pop up when we consider this fusion? Flaubert, of course.
No wonder Ezra Pound, writing about himself as a poet, no doubt, in his fabulous collection of poems, ‘HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLY’, said: “His true Penelope was Flaubert.”
By the 20th Century, the best of the innovative novelists were all writing on the borderline of prose and poetry — Joyce, Proust, Woolf (consider her ‘THE WAVES’), Faulkner, Hemingway, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, Philippe Sollers, the Latin American novelists Julio Cortazar, Alejo Carpentier, C. Cabrera Infante, Jose Lezema Lima, Carlos Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, Severo Sarduy, and lastly,  Octavio Paz, Mexico’s greatest modern poet who published ‘EAGLE OR SUN?’ in the 1950s, which remains one of the freshest books of prose/poetry ever written.

Whitman’s progressive relevance

Again, we have to hark back to Walt Whitman in the mid 19th Century for influential proof of poetry’s fertile sowing of a new line that is not just the oral expression of an ethnic or ‘national’ tongue, but a real meaningful connection to the world around him. However, though Whitman’s audacious form and content in ‘LEAVES OF GRASS’ seemed loose, or informal to some, so did the works of those prose writers mentioned.
The new in art often seems disorderly to those who decide art’s identity in advance, but the disorderly look of democratic literature de Toqueville wrote of is permitted and expressed, not as an instigation towards real-life disorder, but as a creative literary way of working out polemical and emotional pros and cons as a way of avoiding any harmful real-life imitations of informal creativity.
The freedom of CREATIVE literature serves a resolved and socially harmless result. In the first long poem in ‘Leaves of Grass’ are these lines:
‘The smoke of my own breath/ Echoes, ripples, and buzzed whispers…Love-root, silk-thread/ Crotch and vine/ My respiration and inspiration…the beating of my heart…/The passing of blood and air through my lungs,/The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves and of the shore/ And dark-colored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,/ The sound of the belched words of my voice…words loosed to/ The eddies of the wind,/ A few light kisses…a few embraces…a reaching around of arms,/ The play of shine and shade on the trees the supple boughs wag,/ The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields/ And hillsides,/ The feeling of health…the full-noon trill…the song of me/ Rising from bed and meeting the sun.’

Self and universal spirit in poetry

Whitman’s development and delivery of poetic lines — based not on a learned bookish subjection to the formal tradition of English literature — freed poetry to reach beyond a narcissistic and artificial arrangement of metric patterns, and begin to delight in the poetics discovered in the observed and felt arrangement of the perceived world.
It is no wonder that in ‘Song of Myself’, his book’s first long poem, he amazes us with this ultimate comprehension of our human position in time:
‘There was never any more inception than there is now,/nor any more youth or age than there is now;/and will never be any more perfection than there is now,/ nor any more heaven or hell than there is now./ Urge and urge and urge,/always the procreant urge of the world.’  The whole point of these lines is to help us grasp the objective and ultimate perfection of the world.
Is all this some original American poetic philosophy? Malcolm Cowley, one of Whitman’s able critics, commented on Whitman’s belief in “the self being of the same essence as the universal spirit,” which coincides with Oriental wisdom.
How far is this from the poetics of Wei Tai, an 11th Century Chinese poetician who wrote: “Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words.”
The profound 8th Century Chinese poet, Tu Fu, of the Tang Dynasty, demonstrates this early proposal of narrative description in a poem called ‘Midnight’, in which the poet sees and feels and accepts his solitary mortality at the borderline of night and day:
‘By the West pavilion, on a thousand feet of cliff,/ Walking at midnight under my latticed window,/Flying stars pass white along the water,/Transparent beams of moonset flicker on the sand./ At home in the tree, notice the secret bird:/Safe beneath the waves, imagine the green fishes./ From kinsman and friends at the bounds of heaven and earth/Between weapon and buffcoat seldom a letter comes.’