The World Doesn't End

The World Doesn't End (1989) is a collection of prose poems by Charles Simic. The collection won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990.

Contents

The collection begins with an epigraph from Fats Waller: "Let's waltz the Rumba."

The collection is divided into three parts of untitled prose poems, each ranging between two and five lines. Each poem is indicated in the collection's table of contents by the first several words of each poem:

Reception

Some critics have credited The World Doesn't End with a resurgence of the prose poem form in American Poetry. Christopher Buckley argued that Simic chose the prose poem form because it most closely approximates the Eastern European folk tale.