This term is derived from the short “verses” of the Bible (cf. versicle )and etymologi-cally refers to short lines (Occitan and OF); in Eng. it has been so used, esp. to refer to the lines of Hebraic and biblical verse translations, but in Fr. it refers to lines longer than standard meters in the later 19th-c. symbolist prosodies of poets such as Claudel. In this latter sense it denotes a Blakean or Whitmanesque line of variable but most often long length, neither rhymed nor metrical but organized by rhythmic and phrasal cadences. The presence of Whitman in late 19th- and early 20th-c. Fr. verse ensured that the Fr. v. was rhythmically oriented more toward verse than prose, however multiform its realizations. In Claudel’s Cinq grandes odes (1910), the v. claudélien becomes a hybrid; now “line” and “paragraph” are indistinguishable except that the v. is clearly a rhythmic whole. The movement between degrees of rhythmicity allows an ascension from rhapsodic involvement with the world’s primary elements, from a cataloguing “connaissance,” to a less differentiated realm of omniscient “conscience”. And even where, as in Péguy’s verse ( Les Mysteres , 1910-13), the v. emerges from prose, lineation provides those variations in accentual prominence, length of measure, and markedness of juncture which bespeak the modalities of inspiration and response: prose is transcended by the poised and expanded consciousness of verse. In Saint-John Perse’s work ( Anabase , 1924), the v. confronts the reader with challenging decisions about segmentation and association: the v. is a journey punctuated by a variety of rhythmic thresholds and boundaries. If accounts of the structure of v. veer between ones which find in it a larger agglomeration of recognizably traditional rhythmic/metrical units, and ones which locate its rhythm in the movements of enunciation in a periodicity founded upon acoustic echoing and syntactic patterning, it is perhaps because the form is inclusive enough to tolerate their coexistence.
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