I. DISTINCTIONS
V. and pr. are two of the three terms central to any discussion of, and distinctions about, the nature and modes of verbal art. The third is “poetry” (q.v.), which is the most difficult—and crucial—concept of the three. Northrop Frye once remarked that establishing a viable distinction between v. and pr. would allow us to write “page two” of the “elementary textbook expounding the fundamental principles” of crit. ( Anatomy 13). Page one, insofar as it is possible, would answer the question, “What is lit.?” For Frye, the v.-pr. distinction seemed “the most far-reaching of literary facts”; nevertheless, he said in 1957, page two still remained blank. It does not seem so now.
The chief functions of pr. in the modern world are the written representation and communication of information about events, processes, and facts that obtain in the external world. Many readers also implicitly believe that lit. itself, even poetry, makes truth-claims about the world despite the fact that on the surface it is a “fiction” (q.v.): if they believed it didn’t, they would find it little worth reading no matter how great its entertainment value. Many poets, e.g. Auden, have assented strongly to this view. Most modern critics, however, would not assent to such a view, or at least not directly: I. A. Richards, for example, held that propositions asserted in poetry are only “pseudo-statements” (q.v.), and most of the New Critics followed Richards in insisting on an absolute distinction between the langs. of science and poetry (q.v.). Frye himself maintained that lit. “makes no real statements of fact” and is judged not on its truth or falsehood but on its “imaginative consistency”.
Apart from judgments about truth-value, however, both common readers and critics recognize a distinction between v. and pr. Most speakers use “poem” as a synonym for “composition in v.”: they expect poetry to be cast inverse. Yet the attributive term “poetic” is often applied as well to works not in v., works which readers feel are of greater insight, intensity (q.v), or depth of meaning than ordinary writing. And everyone knows that pr., as Eliot once remarked, is written in pr. Such confusing usage raises the logical questions of whether all v. is poetry, or whether all poetry is in v. If the former is true, the latter, its converse, is not, necessarily. The contrapositive, however, “if ? is not poetry, then it is not in v.”, will be true if the proposition is true. Put another way, the questions are, to begin with, is verseform necessary for “poetry”? And second, is it sufficient?
We must first recognize that the two modes, v. and pr., intersect the concept “poetry” and its opposite, nonpoetry. Crossing these yields four categories, which Eng. usage does not capture at all well. Intensified or heightened lang. in verse-form, i.e. “v. poetry”, represents what most people automatically think of as “poetry”; quotidian lang. in verseform is “v. nonpoetry”, sometimes accepted as poetry but considered doggerel (q.v.), sometimes denied to be poetry at all. Heightened lang. not in v. is sometimes called “poetry” or, better, “poetic”, and if it has rhythmic or sound patterning at all, sometimes “prose poetry” (see below); quotidian lang. not in v. is, for lack of a term, just “pr.” To define “poetry” as “a collective term for all poems” (Hynes) simply begs the question. Some readers find the differentia of poetry in heightened lexis and syntax (qq.v.); some find it in versification (q.v.). Either or both will lead to heightened emotion and compressed meaning. If the figuring of lexis and syntax is accomplished via strategies of repetition that are regular enough to be rhythmic, however, the two modes converge toward the middle and merge, producing intermedia.
II. ESSENCE AND FORM
Since antiquity there have been two positions taken on the distinction between v. and pr.; for convenience we may call these the essentialist and the formalist positions.
Essentialists—“affectivists” might be a better term—do not consider verseform essential to the definition of poetry and view poets as more and sometimes other than versifiers. For centuries, from Quintilian (lstc. A.D. )to romanticism, it was a critical commonplace that Lucan was a rhetorician or historian who wrote in v. and that Plato, Xenophon ( Cyropaedia ), and Heliodorus ( Ethiopian History ) were poets. The major Western proponents of this view incl. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Sidney, Wordsworth, Shelley, Arnold, and Croce.
Aristotle himself argues at the outset of the Poetics that metrical form is not a sufficient criterion for “poetry”; for him, the fact that the works of philosophers and historians are in hexameters does not make them poetry. Form does not supersede function in the Aristotelian view. Admittedly, it is difficult to see what Aristotle’s conception of poetry is, fully, because the Poetics concerns itself mainly with dramatic and secondarily with narrative lit., giving only scant attention to what we would now call lyric; and the very sketchy taxonomy of types of poetry and music given in ch. 1 of the Poetics is both confusing and incomplete, either deliberately (Aristotle rightly points out that some forms do not have names) or by virtue of corruption of the text. Aristotle of course grounds his theory on the human instinct or drive for imitation (q.v.), an assumption which would seem to lead naturally to a referential philosophy of lang. and a mimetic theory of lit.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Aristotle makes plot structure or fictiveness the crucial criterion of literariness, as Horace does grandiloquence of lang. and sublimity. Sidney considers verseform neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause: “It is not ryming and versing that maketh Poesie. One may bee a Poet without versing and a versifier without Poetry”; verseform is “but an ornament and no cause of Poetry” (Smith 1.159). For Shelley, “the popular division into pr. and v. is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.” From the essentialist point of view, if the criterion of verseform as the differentia of poetry is abandoned, readers will turn to heightening of diction and figuration (q.v.) of syntax as the criteria. There is, after all, little else.
Formalists consider verseform to be either necessary or sufficient—mainly the former—for the achievement of precisely those effects of heightened intensity, compression, or figured speech which are commonly considered the hallmark of “poetry.” They believe that the resources of verseform are not available to pr., or only minimally so. The difference may seem merely a difference of degree, since of course rhythmical structure and sound patterning can be accomplished in pr. But whereas in pr. the constitutive principle is syntax, and through that, sense, in v. the constitutive device of the sequence (so Jakobson) is design itself, design manifested in sound and rhythm and leading to sense and order, i.e. the organization of readerly experience in the processing of the text. Consequently, the difference in degree of formal structure between v. and pr. raises v. onto another plane and creates a difference in kind.
The chief Western formalists incl. Gorgias, Scaliger, Coleridge ( Biographia literaria ch. 14, perhaps the central text), Hegel, Richards, and Ransom, along with the Rus. Formalists, the New Critics, and Jakobson. Central to their position is the denial of any naive distinction between form and content; they do not consider verseform supererogatory. It is well known that several major Eng. poets, incl. Jonson, Pope, and Whitman, used as a compositional technique the practice of first making a pr. paraphrase (q.v.) of the argument, then casting that into v. But this should not be taken to mean that verseform is merely rearrangement of the words or some superadded wrapper, as Wordsworth seemed to think. Rather, we must see that poets who versify pr. texts, their own or others’, or who translate pr. texts into v., are remaking one verbal mode into an altogether different one. For Coleridge, the very act of introducing meter and rhyme into a discourse fundamentally alters the nature of the expression, not merely the form: all relations between words (hence all meanings) are changed by a change in their principle of selection. The eye altering alters all.
Thoughts do not come into being independent of verbal mode, and consequently change of mode entails change of thought. As Masson put it, meaning “is conditioned beforehand by the form of the expression selected.” This is the antithesis of Croce’s thesis that the aesthetic idea precedes its externalization in a medium. Rather, the physical medium—its limitations, its possibilities, its strategies for formulating concepts, its orders—is an indispensable part of cognition, hence of the creative results of cognition. The New Critical insistence on the irrefrangibility of form and meaning, which is based on Richards and Coleridge and fundamental to formalist method, still seems necessary and valid, though not perhaps sufficient.
At a deeper level, however, it would appear that the formalist and the essentialist perspectives on the problem of poetic form are not two answers to the same question but answers to two different questions about the same issue. The formalist answer concerns itself with the poem as artifact, the essentialist with the poem as experience. “Verse”, we may recall, etymologically means “turn”, namely the turn at the end of the line (q.v.): v. is therefore lang. (1) given rhythmic order and (2) set into lines. But this does not mean that all v. is metrical, for meter is but one form of v. prosody among several, and even metrical v. has several subtypes varying in strictness. Consequently it is a mistake to say that what is not metrical is not poetry or even not v. The point is that v., pr., and poetry are not mutually exclusive or even correlate categories: v. and pr. are modes, while poetry, like drama and fiction, is, for lack of a better word, a genre. Any of the three literary genres may be written in either of the modes or any mixture thereof. The “modes”, however, are not merely forms of writing, but rather forms of structure, since rhythm manifests itself in a linguistic sequence regardless of whether spoken or read. The distinction between v. and pr. is not one between media and essences, precisely, but between structures and effects. Can the formal devices of v. produce effects not obtainable in pr.? The preservation of the distinction demands that the answer be yes.
Lines of v. as manifested on the page are, after all, rhythmic entities before they are graphic entities: if the graphic lines do not show at least some kind of equivalence (q.v.) at the level of sound, they might as well be set as pr., whereas if lines which do show patterning are reset as pr. paragraphs, the meter or rhythmic structure can still be discerned, the line-divisions rediscovered, and the discourse reset as lineated v. This shows that the rhythmic structuring that we associate with v. is inherent in the syntactic strings regardless of presentational mode and would be left intact if print did not exist at all. One of the most interesting and revealing exercises in the study of poetry is to select passages and read them aloud, or else unlineate them and present them as pr., asking auditors or readers to judge whether they are pr. or v.; this was a salon game in the 18th c. Finally, it is worth recalling that much ancient and medieval v. was transcribed without lines, sometimes even without spacing, in order to save costly parchment—written by default, as it were, in pr.
III. INTERANIMATIONS
But making a simple binary distinction between v. and pr. has two shortcomings. First, it may give the misleading impression that what constitutes “v.” or “pr.” is merely a fact to be discovered rather than a cultural and aesthetic convention which varies from one lang. or v. system to another and, even within one lang., from one age to another. Second, it obscures all the more complex and more interesting mixtures, blends, and intermedia which result from each literary mode influencing the other, not to mention the interesting effects of speech forms. Indeed, all the varieties of spoken and written verbal art, pure and mixed, may be schematized as a constellation of types generated from the three gravitational centers, speech forms, pr. forms, and v. forms.
A. Speech Forms
invade both v. and pr. in drama. In v. drama, esp. in blank v. (q.v.), speech is so rapid that the audience usually cannot discriminate ends of v. lines and has little sense of overt meter; as Wright suggests, there is only the more general sense of a rhythmical current. This does not make blank v. “v. only to the eye”, as Dr. Johnson complained, for there is no evidence that auditors of poetry recognize even stricter verse-forms (e.g. sonnets) quickly. It does suggest, however, that the visual form of a poem, its textuality (q.v.) or manifestation in print mode, is an undeniable part of its nature. It also confirms that rhythm itself, which is a phenomenon independent of presentational mode, is a necessary condition of v. In plays where verbal modes are used systematically by a playwright to differentiate characters or the social rank of characters—the paradigm case is Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream , where the nobles usually speak blank ?., the fairies couplets, and the mechanicals pr.—it is only that subtle but essential “rhythmical current” which enables auditors to distinguish versified speeches from pr. speeches at all. Note, however, that plays cast entirely in v., even heroic couplets, are no more “artificial” than plays written in pr. because all literary artworks naturalize their verbal mode, automatize them, so that auditors or readers take the mode as a given. It is only a question then of what effects v. mode may offer which pr. mode cannot, or vice versa. Failure to grasp this point occasioned much critical confusion in the controversies over blank v. and rhyme in the 17th c.
It would seem, then, that blank v. obtains such power precisely because it strikes a balance between rhythmic current and syntactic sense. That is the secret of its success. In Shakespeare’s late plays, where the blank v. achieves more complex and less definable rhythms, the balanced play of phrase against line (Wright) becomes harder to hear, and all clear distinctions between v. and pr. verge on dissolution.
Speech forms invade strict verseforms to produce not a balance or fusion but contrast and tension. Heavy rhyming in short-lined v. with brisk, colloquial, and racy lexis produces the striking comic effects of light v. and satire (qq.v.), as for example in Butler’s Hudibras, Byron’s Don Juan , and Ogden Nash, and sometimes in Housman (“Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff”). The weight of expectation in the verse-form is countered by the lexical surprise of the rhymes: sense springs open at these appointed places. But the ring of natural speech is quite possible in unrhymed lines as well, of course, e.g. Shakespeare’s “I never saw my father in my life” ( Comedy of Errors ).
Pr. too contains representations of speech, such as dialogue and monologue (qq.v.); these are two keys to the success of the novel. Closely allied is what used to be called “stream of consciousness” pr., the staple of Joyce’s Ulysses. These representations have the clear ring of speech and are fundamentally distinct from the nearly voiceless character of discursive pr., which has altogether different rhythms, lexis, and syntax from ordinary speech. Few speakers, for example, produce sentences beginning with conjunctive adverbs or absolutes, or sentences with extensive subordination. Pr. is not speech; it is speech more logically and elaborately wrought, an accomplishment made possible by a medium where reflection and rereading are encouraged and where the receiver-reader rather than the speaker controls the pace of the delivery of information.
The other conspicuous manifestation of speech forms in literary art concerns sound patterning. Increase in sound patterning, apart from purely rhythmic effects, appears in speech for a variety of effects. Among the first of these is the mnemonic one, for it is as certain as it is unexplained that sound figuration in short speech forms such as aphorisms, epigrams, and proverbs greatly enhances memorization. Longer forms include (apart from speech disorders) both conscious and unconscious patterning, as in echolalia and glosso-lalia. Most auditors do not perceive aphorisms or proverbs as pr. and probably would not classify the longer forms so either, though they do recognize them as verbally artful.
In lit., sound patterning is used almost automatically for passages of visionary or prophetic passages, from the Old Testament to Blake, and also for literary imitations (often comic) of the speech of illiterate people (e.g. Mistress Quickly in Shakespeare), drunks (Falstaff), and insane persons (some of Tom o’ Bedlam’s speeches in King Lear ). It also appears prominently, of course, in the works of poets who themselves have been thought to have been insane (Christopher Smart, Hölder-lin). In pr., the great modern masters are Sterne, Stein, and Joyce. In v, as sound patterning increases, apart from structural sound such as alliteration (q.v.) in OE or rhyme in modern Eng., meaning density is both increased and counterbalanced by pure pattern and the nonsemantic perception thereof. But critics routinely condemn poets such as Swinburne and Dylan Thomas in whose work sound-patterning far outstrips sense, a fact which suggests that matter—meaning, import, “prosaic” sense—is, in mainstream critical judgment, superordinate as a criterion to verse-craft. The poets most valorized in our own time, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, have pressed against convention in both directions.
B. Prose Forms
We must remember that modern notions of “pr.” are localized and conventional, formed largely by the invention of printing, the shape of the codex page, and (esp.) the devel. of the novel. In the ancient and medieval worlds, the kinds of expository texts now automatically cast into pr. were often cast in v, incl. works on botany, zoology, astronomy, physics, history, genealogy, law, medicine, philosophy, mathematics, rhetoric, and grammar. So were fictional texts. All the literary genres were once versified; now only some are.
Further, pr. itself must not be thought of as the neutral ground or zero degree against which v. deviates; pr. of whatever form, literary or quotidian, is already an artificial and stylized form, heavily influenced by the conditions of writing and by the rhythms of discursive thought. And deviation is not finally the most productive means for distinguishing v. from pr. or for conceptualizing either of them, for both modes are already deviations from speech, and both contain an enormous range of variation within their domains. Even speech itself varies greatly with context. Ordinary conversational speech is mainly fragmentary and discontinuous in character, highly elliptical, often para-tactic, sometimes repetitive and other times extensively reliant on tacit conventions of mutual assumption and implication. But there are many contexts in which speech is highly stylized and figured, such as sermons or political oratory, where gifted or trained speakers can compose figured discourse extemporaneously. The strategies for such figuration are the figures codified in Cl. rhetoric. Stylization, therefore, maybe applied to speech, to pr., and to v.; it is degree of figuration or stylization that matters for heightening lang., not the presentational mode.
It is for these reasons that Frye and others have held that meter is in fact closer to speech than pr., in being a less complex form of stylization, and have used this claim to explain why pr. does not develop in some cultures, whereas v. has been developed in every known culture, and why, even when pr. does develop, it is “normally a late and sophisticated devel. in the history of a lit.”
Pr. rhet. written into v. produces forms such as the neoclassical closed or heroic couplet (q.v.). In the couplets of Pope, the fitting of sentence structure with meter is so finely wrought as to seem all but inevitable, sprezzatura executed nearly to perfection. Here metrical structure and rhyme-binding are close and tight, and syntax structural and rhetorical, while lexis (pure word choice) is, by contrast, altogether natural. This discordia concors is what led Matthew Arnold to call Pope one of the masters of Eng. pr. That remark happens to apply more accurately to the enjambed or open couplet than the closed; in any event, it clarifies the more important point that quotidian diction and syntax inside any verseform always pose the threat of pr. Conversely, elevated diction or convoluted syntax heighten the impression of poetry even in simple or conventionalized verseforms like the sonnet— as in the sonnets of Hopkins.
C. Verse Forms
also influence or overwrite pr.: in some cultures, such as Chinese and Arabic, rhythmical pr. and even rhyme-prose have been extensively cultivated. The chief effect of using rhetorical devices in pr. is simply to impose lexical and syntactic structure. Increased rhetorical patterning leads to parallelism, balance, symmetry, contrast, and “point” in phrases and clauses. If the patterning is extended down to the level of syllables and sound, pr. achieves effects which are rhythmical if not metrical, precisely as in v. Such effects are conspicuous in Ciceronian pr., with its clausulae, in the medieval cursus, in 16th-c. euphuism (incl. elaborate sound-patterning), in 17th-c. mannerist and baroque (qq.v.) pr., and in all religious and meditative pr. deriving from the penitential and sermon traditions and so influenced by the parallelistic structure of the Hebrew prosody of the Old Testament, such as Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial or Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying.
Western poets have also experimented with v. novels; indeed, the line between such v. novels as E. B. Browning’s Aurora Leigh or Nabokov’s Pale Fire and narrative poems such as Puskin’s Evgenij Onegin is, if one ignores page lineation, indeterminate (for discussion of both). Subtler manifestations of v. influence also appear: the two paragraphs printed as pr. in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise which are in fact Spenserian stanzas (q.v.) remind one of the sonnets embedded in Romeo and Juliet , and there is blank verse in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop.
IV. HISTORY
In the Middle Ages, intermingling of modes and genres was more pervasive than at any other time in the history of Western letters and not seriously rivaled again until the late 19th c The importance of the processes of translation, imitation, adaptation, and paraphrase in rhet. insured that the boundaries between v. and pr. would be fluid. Translations and paraphrases were made sometimes by the same writer, other times at a distance of several centuries. Particularly conspicuous are the metrical saints’ lives, the medieval equivalent of the modern popular novel: pr. versions abound throughout the Middle Ages. Several writers explored the opus geminatum , a work written in two versions, one v., one pr., typically for two different audiences (learned and lay); examples incl. Aldhelm’s De virginitate and Bede’s life of St. Cuthbert. These have their poetic parallel in works of metrical (quantitative) poetry adapted to rhythmical (accentual) form for the illiterate masses. Writers of metrical texts might also place a pr. paraphrase in a facing column, as Hrabanus Maurus does in the De laudibus sanctae crucis. School training in Cl. rhet. included standard exercises in translation and paraphrase, the copia , back and forth from Lat. to vernacular and from v. to pr., in both directions and modes: the young Shakespeare endured these exercises at school as did the young Augustine before him. Rhet. and poetic, later distinct, were mutually permeable in the Middle Ages.
In addition to works written in alternative v. and pr. modes, a variety of mixtures and blends were explored, some of which developed into important genres with long lives. Chief among the mixtures is the prosimetrum (q.v.), a pr. text with lyric insets in a variety of meters, inspired in Med. Lat. by the example of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and extended to vernacular forms such as the OF chante-fable (q.v.), a performance sung and spoken by two minstrels in alternation. From such medieval exemplars, as well as the model of the canticum and diverbia (accompanied song and spoken dialogue—q.v.) of Lat. drama (Plautus), medieval drama developed the practices of (1) using v. and pr. modes to differentiate characters and (2) intercalating lyric insets or songs in texts whether v. or pr. Both practices were carried into Ren. drama, where even subtler transitions are possible: a character shifting from loftier to more mundane thoughts may shift from one mode to the other; or, under the pressure of shattering emotion, a character may (as more than once in Marlowe) run from v. into pr. in mid-sentence.
It is of interest that pr. was not developed extensively in drama until late: despite the appearance of early works such as Gascoigne’s Supposes and later comedies, the success of Shakespearean blank v. and the 17th-c. heroic couplet was such that the first Eng. tragedy in pr., George Lillo’s The London Merchant , did not appear until 1731; and pr. was not the staple mode of drama until the 19th c., a result of the novel. Ren. drama, following medieval precedent, first developed rhymed verseforms (esp. the fourteener [q.v.]), some of them very elaborate, and ornate rhetorical diction. Thereafter it moved (esp. in the hands of Shakespeare) mainly in the direction of natural speech; pr. was used mainly for contrastive functions in versified plays, and became the medium of choice only after dramatists had become more conscious of the page than of the theater.
In addition to mixtures were medieval blends: v. rhythm and rhyme influenced pr. to produce rhymed pr. (Norden) and the rhythmical pr. of ecclesiastical correspondence known as the cursus. Both of the two principal outlets for pr. in the Middle Ages, letter-writing ( ars dictaminis ) and preaching ( ars praedicandi ), tended to be rhythmical. Pr. also influenced v.: prosa was the standard technical term for the medieval sequence, on account of the wording of its close (see Curtius).
In the modern age, the two chief blended forms have both been movements from v. toward pr. First is “free v.” (q.v.), which is the awkward and misleading modern term for a heterogeneous group of nonmetrical but still rhythmical or (at the very least) lineated verbal sequences. Many reactionary critics of the late 19th and early 20th cs. (e.g. Saintsbury) objected to free v. as scarcely v. at all, since it lacked the badge of meter, which would certify strict control of the medium, strict rules making for strong order in a rigidly hierarchical world view. Free v. is obviously literary and minimally v. by the simple criterion of being set in (graphic) lines even if it has no other rhythmical structure, heightened diction, or figured syntax, though many varieties have sought at least some kind of rhythm. That fact, however, is only a fact and not a value judgment; absence of metrical structure may be deemed a pejorative by critics hostile to sweeping changes in the cultural conditions which valorized meter, or an approbative by avant-garde critics who welcome those changes. The blurring of the line (!) between v. and pr. is simply one literary index of an age which prefers to avoid sharp distinctions, or at least distinctions as traditionally drawn, and to prefer overlapping forms, blended forms, boundary conditions, and all more complex or more fluid composites.
Second is the prose poem (q.v.), developed in France in the late 19th c. and cultivated intensively again in America in the deluge after the Sixties. As with the rhythmical pr. which developed in antiquity, it is difficult to tell whether the modern prose poem developed from the direction of pr. or v. Since it has been cultivated mainly by poets, it would seem the latter. If so, then prose poets refuse v. lineation and the regularity of v. rhythm yet nevertheless write rhythmical or rhetorical figuration back onto pr. in an effort to attain a level of incantatory speech and incandescent consciousness which ratiocinative pr. cannot achieve, because it has not the means.
User Comments Add a comment…