Whence and Whither Verse?

by Don Webb

Two works that have appeared recently in Bewildering Stories use free verse where one might expect prose: Camille Alexa’s “Blind Date,” in this issue, and Bill Bowler’s “His and Hers,” in issues 251 and 253. And they are far from the only ones; we could cite many other authors who do the same thing.

Readers have commented that “Blind Date” could be written in straight prose or as a one-scene drama and that “His and Hers” might be a mixture of genres: lyrical prose, verse, and drama combined. Are still other forms possible? Very likely, and there are precedents for all of them.

Robert Frost did not like free verse. He compared it to “playing tennis with the net down.” Not for him verse without rhyme or rhythm; his poetic vision does seem to fit best a measured, classical style. And yet free verse had already been around for a while: after Walt Whitman, its place in poetry was assured. But Robert Frost was making a point that goes beyond form. To explore the implications would be very interesting, but that’s a task for another time.

Do line breaks alone suffice to qualify something as a poem rather than as a work of prose? It depends on what the literary conventions happen to be.

Up to the 18th century, most “serious” literature was written in verse — and a lot of that was written in Latin, to boot. Content did not matter: a “poem” could be lyrical, narrative, or didactic in any number of subgenres. Verse gave the work its gravity: it said, “I took the trouble to write this with a certain meter and rhyme; that means you’re supposed to take it seriously.” Was there no prose? Yes, but it wasn’t “serious” literature — until Rabelais made both prose and comedy a serious matter once and for all.

Even the vernacular literature — from songs to short stories to romances — was mostly in verse. All the great national epics of Europe are narratives in verse:

Thus opens the Song of Roland. It’s almost a thousand years old now, and the glory days of Charlemagne were as recent to the author as George Washington is to us. The epic states its purpose up front: it’s propaganda for French nationalism and for the First Crusade. Would later ages have written such a thing in verse? No, our literary conventions are radically different: the story would become a blockbuster film, a novel in prose, or even a graphic novel.

But why verse in the first place? That is, aside from: “We’ve always done it that way.” Two reasons: verse is the way we talk, and verse is easy to remember. Teams of minstrels would travel from fair to fair and recite the Roland to the crowds, perhaps even dramatizing it a bit.

Was it ever sung? After all, verse has its origin in the rhythms of song. It could be sung but probably never was: 4,002 verses make quite an opera, and the music would have had to be very monotonous even to the medieval ear.

Rhyme and rhythm make verse even easier to remember. The Song of Roland uses assonance rather than rhyme, but the 4-6 rhythm is standard for the epic.

Free verse is possible in any language, of course. But in the Romance languages, where rhyme is almost too easy, free verse is an anomaly; it looks like a rough draft of a poem. The distinction is made, rather, between classical and popular metrics. In English, end rhyme is much more difficult. Who knows: had it not been for the prestige of French, English might have kept the ancient Germanic practice of alliterating initial stressed syllables.

Dispensing with rhyme would then seem to be a very practical stage in the evolution of English poetry; Shakespeare had no problem with that in his plays. But when rhythm and form go as well, what remains is pure content.

What, then, is verse without rhyme or rhythm? Prose with arbitrary line breaks. Anything can be written that way:

Write on a narrow sheet of paper.
Or set the margins wide enough
in your word processor, turn off
word wrap, and the computer will
do it for you.

But that’s silly. What might be the point of line breaks? What purpose might they serve?

• To aid in reading aloud?

  Very well:
  in that case,
  the line breaks would presumably occur
  at the end
  of each phrase or clause,
  and we hiccup our way
  through the text,
  scrolling like mad.

• To supply visual emphasis?

  Very well: then presumably the more
  emphatic
  the words are, the
  shorter
  the line is, and the
  longer
  the line, the more
  normal
  the emphasis will be. And we
  shout
  our way through the text.

Aside from that, I’m out of ideas. Anything else may mean something to the author, which is all well and good. At an extreme, a writer might say, “None of that matters: verse expresses my soul-felt intention; I feel it’s the right thing to do, and that’s the way it has to be.”

But what will it mean to the reader? “Don’t get all mystical on me. I have no way of knowing what your intention really is, and I’m beginning to wonder if you know. Does any text have to be in one form rather than another? How many novels and plays have been adapted to film more or less well? How many good songs make bad poems, and vice-versa? Each form has its own strengths. Literature is dynamic; it’s not engraved in stone.”

Does this mean that “Blind Date” should have been written as a drama or that “His and Hers” should have been written as prose or a mixture of genres? By the same token, should the highly visual “Dimmity Dumpling and the Scarlet Cloak” have been written as a film script? Should “Scratch Handicap,” which is almost exclusively auditory, have been written as a radio play? No, “should” has no place here; rather, replace it with “could” and all sorts of opportunities appear.

To repeat: each form has its own strengths. The author’s task is to seek a harmony of form and content. As readers we are free to imagine other possible forms; that’s part of the work of literary criticism, i.e. professional reading. Meanwhile, we have only what we’re given, and we make the most of it.

Copyright © 2007 by Don Webb