In literary criticism, that which is recognized as prosaic lacks a unified definition. A myriad of different aspects are related to the term in accordance with the intentions and needs of the critic. A certain choice of vocabulary may be understood as prosaic, as well as a philosophical or rhetorical tendency (Gullar, 2021). Prosaic may also be the intrusion of everyday life and lived experiences (Gullar, 2021) or less emotionally intense passages (Eliot, 1919). Finally, prosaic can be generally described as that which lacks poetry and thus may be turned into poetic matter (Paz, 1986). This research then proposes a metacritic study which gathers uses of the term “prosaic” by a selection of theoreticians, in order to investigate such variations of meaning in its applications and to discuss the underlying structure to these descriptions. In the absence of a univocal definition, what remains constant seems to be the contrasting element: prosaic is opposed to poetic. We propose to scrutinize this opposition not in the descriptive terms of what may or may not fit into each form – literary tradition would immediately disavow such endeavor –, but in tensive terms (Zilberberg, 2006) and suggest that prosaic and poetic may be understood as forces in competition within literary experiences, analogously to Tatit’s (2016) pair musicalization vs. orality. Thus seen, the prosaic/poetic opposition may be apprehended as fluctuating descriptive values, giving rise to different conceptions of what is perceived as prosaic in the course of varying literary praxes (Fontanille; Zilberberg, 1998).