Claims for poetry's distinctiveness often rely on comparisons with prose. Charles Bernstein writes that ‘in prose you start with the world / and find the words to match; in poetry you start / with the words and find the world in them’. For example, William Carlos Williams wrote that where the purpose of prose is ‘to clarify and enlighten the understanding’, poetry is concerned with ‘the perfection of new forms as additions to nature’. Finally, Geoffrey Leech wrote that ‘Obtrusive irregularity (poetic deviation) and obtrusive regularity (parallelism) account for most of what is characteristic of poetic language’. The comparison with prose is implicit.

I want to suggest another way of thinking about poetry's distinctiveness. Poetry can be distinguished by two interlinked assumptions: that poets and readers can inhabit other bodies; and that form and rhythm can facilitate that habitation. Sometimes the other body is the poet's own; sometimes it is a body that he or she imagines. Poetry is where we learn and know what ethical demands feel like. Twentieth-century British poetry can be read, at least in part, as a narrative of bodily habitation that moves from beliefs in a representatively national body to progressive disillusionment with physical agency.

The career of F.T. P rince was contemporaneous with this body narrative and his relative distance from major poetic groupings and trends enabled his poetry to contribute to the narrative while offering an unillusioned commentary upon it. This chapter argues that Prince's engagement with the larger narrative of national bodies is visible in many of his more substantial poems and sequences.

I am not of course suggesting that this bodily narrative is the case with all twentieth-century poems but it is the case with a surprising number: from T.S. E liot's ‘Prufrock’ to Erin Moure's O Cidadan, from Rupert Brooke to Jenny Joseph, from absent-bodied elegies to poems celebrating public occasions. Why should this be so? In poems where the poet writes ‘I’, we are receiving a direct invitation to feel as him or her. In poems where other bodies are described, bodies become sites of politics, communication, etc. The body becomes the ultimate objective correlative.