Verse

by George Dance

A verse is formally a single line in a metrical composition. However, the word has come to mean poetry in general (or sometimes even non-poetry) written in lines of a regular metrical pattern.

Poetry and verse
Though "poetry" and "verse" can be (and often are) used interchangeably, they do not mean the same thing. For instance, the word "verse" (rather than "poetry") is commonly used to distinguish writing from prose. Where the common unit of prose is purely grammatical, such as a sentence or paragraph, the unit of verse is the metrical line.

Poetry, on the other hand, can be written in prose. Prose poetry is text written in prose but generally recognized as poetry. It is generally recognized, then, that poetry is not simply verse; that there is some poetry that is not verse.

In the same way, verse is not simply poery; there is also some verse that is not poetry. Paradigm non-poetry verses would be those composed strictly as memory aids, such as this one:
 * "I" before "E"
 * Except after"C"
 * Or when sounded as "A"
 * As in "neighbour" and "weigh".

Other types of verse that look different from poetry include light verse, such as limericks; some (not all) song lyrics; the comic rhymes of Robert W. Service, Banjo Paterson, or Franklin P. Adams; and the equally unfashionable didactic verse of Edgar Guest.

It has often been charged of popular writers of verse, like Service and Rudyard Kipling, that what they write is in no way poetry. In his introduction to his Choice of Kipling's Verse (1941), T.S. Eliot complained that "most studies of Kipling ... have evaded the question – which is, nevertheless, a question which everyone asks – whether Kipling's verse really is poetry."

For Service, there was no question whether his verse was poetry or not: it was not, and had never been meant to be. "Verse, not poetry, is what I was after ... something the man in the street would take notice of and the sweet old lady would paste in her album; something the schoolboy would spout and the fellow in the pub would quote. Yet I never wrote to please anyone but myself; it just happened. I belonged to the simple folks whom I liked to please.â€

Here the word 'verse' is being used as the opposite of 'poetry.' Yet what Service means by 'verse', and what Eliot means by Kipling's 'verse', is no different from what anyone else means by it. Why then, do so many people confuse or conflate them? Probably because, historically (in the Western canon), poetry was verse.

From the emergence of Middle English, until the early 20th century, with scattered exceptions, poetry in English was written in verse. The most famous exception to that was the poetry in the King James Bible - but the Bible was not considered poetry, and in any case it was a translation of non-Western poems and prose.

The 20th century saw the rise and acceptance of modernist poetry in English, poetry that was written in "[[fre vere', meaning that it was not written in verse. Free verse was the dominant form of poetry for most of the 20th century, and still may be today. The decades since the 1980s have seen a renewed interest in poetry written in verse.

Types of verse
In a stressed language like English, lines of verse can be lines of a certain number of syllables (syllabic verse); or lines of a certain number of stressed syllables (accentual verse); or lines of a certain number of both (accentual-syllabic verse).

Accentual verse
Accentual verse is a metrical system based only on the number of stressed or accented syllables in a line. In accentual verse the total number of syllables can vary, so long as each line has the prescribed number of accents. Accentual verse was the system used in Germanic-language poetry, including Old English.

Syllabic verse
Syllabic verse, which is based on the total number of syllables in a line, is the predominant system of verse in basically unstressed languages like French. After the Norman Conquest, when French replaced English as the language of the upper class, syllabic poetry began to be learned and written. While it never replaced the accentual verse of English, it was undoubtedly influential in the latter's evolution into the hybrid accentual-syllabic system predominant in Modern English.

Accentual-syllabic verse
Accentual-syllabic verse, the metrical system most commonly used in English poetry, counts both the number of stresses and the number of syllables, in each line. A line of accentual-syllabic verse is formed of a fixed number of feet, each of which has both one stressed syllable, and the same number of unstressed syllables: meaning that each line has both the same number of syllables and the same number of accents.

The verse form that Geoffrey Chaucer adopted, for example, iambic pentameter (IP), had lines formed of five feet, each of which consisted of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. With some reasonable variation, iambic pentameter is verse of five stresses and ten syllables.

It is usually if not always accentual-syllabic verse that is referred to by the terms "metered verse" or "metric verse", "formal verse," or simply "verse."

Rhymed verse
Chaucer introduced another innovation derived from French poetry: the end-rhyme. Every two lines of his IP were linked together by a rhyme at the line end; a verse form later called the heroic couplet. The heroic couplet was a primitive rhyme. But it paved the way for increasingly ornate rhyme schemes later. And in the hands of masters like John Dryden and Alexander Pope, it was shown to be capable of great sophistication. Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great[....] In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much[....] Sole judge of Truth, in endless error hurl'd:   The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! – Alexander Pope, "Essay on Man"

Blank verse
The tradition of unrhymed verse continued, though. Blank verse – verse having a regular meter, but no end-rhyme – was the new form. Unrhymed iambic pentameter (IP) (the same meter Chaucer had used) proved particularly effective for verse drama. As used by Christopher Marlowe, (IP) blank verse became the standard for verse drama in Tudor England. Then, in the plays of William Shakespeare, blank verse set a new standard for English poetry in general.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
 * – William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19-28.

Major poets continued to write in IP blank verse in the following centuries: John Milton, William Wordsworth, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Frost, E.J. Pratt.

Verse forms and stanzas
 Despite the success of blank verse, poetry became increasingly identified with rhymed verse over six centuries after owing Chaucer. A new innovation was that of the stanza, a subgroups of lines within a poem with its own rhyme scheme and metrical pattern. Edmund Spenser introduced a 9-line rhyming stanza, consisting of 8 lines of IP with a concluding Alexandrine, which still bears his name, and which was still being used (by Charles Sangster, for instance) in the 19th century.

Spenser also wrote his own variation of an Italian form, the sonnet – as did Shakespeare, whose sonnets have been as influential as his plays. The sonnet, originally consisting of two different stanza forms (an octave and a sestet) put together, has become the most popular stanza form in English poetry.

More and more intricate stanza forms, with more intricate rhymes and metrical variations, have been tried by English poets over the centuries, many of them from France: the ballade, the triolet, the villanelle, the rondeau and the rondel and the roundel. Other poets constructed unique stanza forms for individual poems, varying meter and rhyme for an almost musical effect. The only fixed rules were that each line rhymed with another, and every stanza had to be the same (ie, the same number of lines, each with the same meter, in the same order, and rhyming the same).

Edmund Waller used this stanza in his 1645 'Song' known as "Go, lovely Rose": Go, lovely Rose — Tell her that wastes her time and me, That now she knows, When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be. A more elaborate stanza form from Robert Herrick's "To Daffodils": Fair daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon; As yet the early-rising sun Has not attain'd his noon. Stay, stay Until the hasting day Has run But to the evensong; And having prayed together, we       Will go with you along.

The ode allowed a poet to construct his own stanza form, but then he had the task of producing a major poem using it alone.

Free Verse
It is debatable whether free verse is verse at all; free verse, or open form, is usually usually defined as lines having no fixed meter or end rhyme. The fact that free verse is written in lines makes it verse-like, while the fact of it having no meter counts against its being verse.

Certainly some free verse, especially the rhymed variety, looks (and sounds) no different from verse written in stanzas. Matthew Arnold wrote an early example, "Dover Beach". Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is another example, as is Ezra Pound's "Envoi" to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (a riff on the Waller verse quoted above):

GO, dumb-born book, Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes: Hadst thou but song As thou hast subjects known, Then were there cause in thee that should condone Even my faults that heavy upon me lie, And build her glories their longevity.

(Notice how lines 2, 3-4, 5, and 7 are all examples of iambic pentameter (IP) (and 6 is loose IP). Much of contemporary "free verse" is actually constructed of more or less loose IP.)

On the other hand, there are other genres of free verse (going back at least as far as Walt Whitman) that appear to owe nothing to verse (as the term has been used here).

Take this example, an excerpt from Michael Basinski's "Trailers": it is difficult to see where lines start and end, much discern any metrical pattern or rhyme scheme:

from Trailers
[...]  Nut sinsit swimsuit in a air an pork, pore porus Walrus is dread full fall I am, A (polka band quotes:::               “ice cubes and be˜er boys, booys sharks                ioce cuobeos incubi (us..suc) a,o,ndo beooer                that’soew Oall cows w˜e wanot isowl                ice cuboyes eyes anod vowel beer”   pell I, pill a, av, ˜○○ ivut if u undead off day   pight t○ide know½ untied   what not be can’t ○○

(a lettuce clot–hed in by in un) ○ disrob ○

˜  Pan Ann I ear hair I  Can ˜ rain I             ˜ pana˜      ˜ ˜…bucky rue boo˜cky be ○○˜aver, aviatoreve here’–s t˜he new –Ipana…˜˜ I pa not (useful toothpaste quote or smile(s)  Pan of our teeth ontopoVov Votka on top (tap)  Big Top                           “Tops never Stops”   Cyrano D˜ Bergerac (useful quotes:

—um ex or ur h,  amoongl—ue r, s, t, u, v, (˜) fr———uit fly, t—o date [...]


 * – Michael Basinski. Licensed CC-BY-NC-ND-3.0.

Verse today
Even at the height of open form poetry's popularity in the 20th century, there were poets who wrote in verse. Yeats continued to until he died. W.H. Auden wrote both free and traditional verse; similarly, Canada's E.J. Pratt quickly moved from his early free verse to epical blank verse.

The most prominent 20th century American poet to write in verse was Robert Frost. There are many others whom changing fashion or overlong copyright has allowed to be forgotten: Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, Edwin Arlington Robinson.

The New Critics (John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Yvor Winters) were outspoken advocates of formal verse. They inspired others who continued to experiment with formal verse through the 1960s and 1970s, including Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov, and Richard Wilbur.

The late 20th century saw the birth of a literary movement, the New Formalism, explicitly advocating a return to traditional metered and rhymed verse. Prominent New Formalists include Dana Gioia, Marilyn Hacker, Phillis Levin, Molly Peacock, and Timothy Steele.

Poets and editors Mark Jarman and David Mason wrote in the preface to their 1996 anthology, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism: "It is no surprise that the most significant development in recent American poetry has been a resurgence of meter and rhyme, as well as narrative, among large numbers of young poets, after a period when these essential elements of verse had been suppressed."