EN
This is a review of the criticism of the prose poem, a genre which has so far attracted hardly any attention in Poland. A survey of the most important contributions to that field, written in English and French within the last fifty years, reveals a fascinating and ambiguous portrait of the prose poem. Its protean, hybrid nature of an anti-genre aspiring to the status of 'the ultimate genre' eludes definition and the same time acts as a tantalizing challenge. It seems, however, that any fresh attempt to work out a model of the prose poem in the context of the established theoretical and ideological approaches runs the risk of projecting and reinforcing those discourses rather than taking us to the heart of the prose poem.