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4146-002-Final Pass-0FM.Indd © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. VERSE AND PROSE 1507 solemn lyrics as well as for shorter amatory and longer itself. By analogy, the word means “a row” or “a line of narrative poems: it is particularly common for *com- writing,” esp. a line a poet composes in making a poem. plaints and epyllia (see epyllion) . Shakespeare used Etymologically, versus may recall the *boustrophedon it again in Romeo and Juliet , Love’s Labour’s Lost , and or “turning-ox” style of writing we fi nd in some Etrus- other plays. Many -line poems of the th c. con- can and early Roman inscriptions, in which the lines tain three Venus and Adonis stanzas; some of them travel, like an ox drawing a plough back and forth on (many of the sonnet-related poems in Th omas a fi eld, alternately from right to left and left to right. Watson’s Hekatompathia ; Sidney’s Old Arcadia , Th e Gr. equivalent of versus is metron , “meter” or “mea- Certain Son nets ; Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphoses ) sure,” which conveys the same suggestions of length seem to be larger structural imitations of the stanza and regularity. form itself: two corresponding or analogous stanzas Th e ancients lack a specifi c noun for prose , a cir- are followed by a third departing from the analogy cumstance to which we will return below. Th eir nearest and concluding the poem succinctly. Th is AA/B pat- equivalents, the Gr. logos and the Lat. oratio , carry a wide tern is descended from the *canzone and canso . Th e range of denotations, incl. “word,” “language,” “speech,” Shakespearean sonnet clearly resembles such poems “story,” “conversation,” “oration,” “discourse,” “argu- in that it ends with a couplet having the same closural ment,” “opinion,” and “account.” To indicate “prose,” function. Th e Venus and Adonis stanza has been one particularly in terms of its literary practice, Roman writ- of the most popular and superbly handled forms in ers often attach an adjective to oratio . Th e most common Eng. and Am. poetry up to our time (seven poems by of the resulting phrases is oratio soluta , “speech loosened William Wordsworth; John Wain, “Time Was”; Th eo- [from meter],” but we also encounter (e.g., Quintilian, dore Roethke, “Four for John Davies”; Th om Gunn, Institutio oratoria ..) prosa oratio , “straightforward “Mirror for Poets”; Robert Lowell, “April Birthday at speech.” Versus is related to vertere , “to turn,” and pro- Sea”). sus to provertere , “to turn forward”; and this morpho- E. Haüblein; T.V.F. Brogan logical connection between versus and prosus and their sharply contrastive characters—the fi rst word signifying VERISIMILITUDE. See mimesis. recurrence to a previously established course or pattern, the second indicating continuous movement in one direction —could explain why, in late antiquity and the VERS . () In Occitan, a term used by the early *trou- Middle Ages, prosa oratio , in the ultimately contracted badours to designate any song, incl. the love song, later form of prosa , establishes itself as our noun. called *canso or chanso . Th e term derives from med. In addition to its primary meaning, the term verse Lat. versus . Distinctions between canso and vers were serves, esp. in the U.K., as a synonym for “stanza.” discussed by some troubadours ca. , when it was Verses also refer to those numbered divisions of the becoming an outmoded term. During the th c., it chapters of the Bible that became standard after the was revived to denote songs on moral, political, or scholar and printer Robert Estienne introduced them satirical subjects (see sirventes ) rather than amatory into his ed. of the Gr. NT of . Of the secondary ones. Th e vers is apt to have short and uncomplicated meanings of prose , the most notable may be that which stanzas. () In mod. Fr., the principal term for both the applies to the texts of the melismas , or “sequences,” of discrete line of verse and verse taken generically, as a the med. mass. Since the melismas required perform- form or mode of expression. ᭿ ers to chant complicated musical phrases to a single Jeanroy, v. ; J. Chailley, “Les Premiers Troubadours syllable, young singers esp. had diffi culty remember- et le versus de l’école d’Aquitaine,” Romania (); ing them. To make the melodies easier to recall, writers J. H. Marshall, “Le Vers au XIIe siècle: Genre poé- started, in the th c., to set words to them. Because tique?” Revue de langue et litté rature d’Oc – (); these texts were initially in prose, they took that name, Chambers; E. Köhler, “‘Vers’ und Kanzone,” GRLMA though prosae were gradually elaborated and, by the .. (); and “Zum Verhaltnis von vers und canso th c., were composed in rhymed accentual verse. bei den Trobadors,” Etudes de philologie romane et Writers and readers commonly regard verse and d’histoire litteraire off erts a Jules Horrent, ed. J. M. prose as distinct from or even opposite to one another. D’Heur et al. (). Verse involves *measure—it organizes speech into units F. M. Chambers; J. H. Marshall; C. Scott of a specifi c length and rhythmical character—whereas prose fl ows more freely at the discretion of the writer VERSE AND PROSE or speaker employing it. Verse is, as the OED puts it, “metrical composition, form, or structure; language or I . Defi nitions and Background literary work written or spoken in metre; poetry, esp. I I . History of Verse and Prose with reference to metrical form. Opposed to prose .” III. Collaborations between Verse and Prose Prose is, in contrast, “the ordinary form of written or I V . Transformations by Paraphrase or Transla tion spoken language, without metrical structure: esp. as V . Free Verse and Prose Poetry a species or division of literature. Opposed to poetry , V I . Conclusions verse , rime , or metre .” I . Defi nitions and Background . Th e term verse derives In one respect, we exhaust the subject by noting the from the Lat. versus , which originally denotes “a turn- diff erence between verse with its rhythmical organi- ing” of a plough at the end of a furrow or the furrow zation and prose with its rhythmical freedom; yet in © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 1508 VERSE AND PROSE other respects, many factors complicate the relation- the body in general, and the ear in particular, a pur- ship of the two media and blur the boundary between chase on meaning and signifi cance. So, too, when them. Th roughout lit. hist., verse writers and prose a lang. is young or in a state of transition, metrical writers share stylistic concerns and rhetorical strate- constraints help writers focus its grammar and explore gies, and their methods of composition overlap in its idioms and vocabulary, with the result that poets fascinating ways. Further, the relative status of verse and their verse forms exercise a permanent infl uence and of prose shifts over time. Whereas from antiquity on subsequent linguistic evolution. Mod. Eng., for ex- through the Ren., verse is preeminently the vehicle for ample, would not have developed quite in the way it imaginative lit., thereafter prose genres like the novel has, nor would we speak and think in quite the ways enjoy increasing prominence. Moreover, the expressive we do, if the iambic pentameter and William Shake- theories of lit. that arise during the romantic period speare had never existed. call into question the effi cacy of artifi ce, and many When literary prose does arise, its writers often writers come to believe that verse, with its regulated begin by imitating verse, as can be seen in the Eur. trad. rhythm, is unduly mechanical and that prose, with its When in the th c. bce , Gorgias establishes oratory freer rhythms, possesses greater organic authenticity. as an independent art, his eff ort involves nothing less Such convictions contribute, in the th c., to the than importing into prose devices suggestive of verse, devel. and widespread adoption of *free verse, many incl., according to Diodorus Siculus (Library of History of whose modes blend into verse elements of com- ..-), *isocolon (clauses of similar length), pari- position formerly associated with prose. And despite son (balanced clauses) and *homoeoteuleton (fl ectional what dicts. say, some might argue that the opposition rhyme). More specifi cally, Gorgias’s revolutionary pe- between the media has ceased to obtain and that, as riodic style (lexis periodos ) aims to make, as Demetrius W. C. Williams urges in a letter in to Horace remarks (On Style ), “the periods succeed one another Gregory, “there’s an identity between prose and verse, with no less regularity than the hexameters in the poetry not an antithesis.” of Homer” (trans. Loeb Library ed.). Similarly, when Gorgias’s student Isocrates starts systematically to culti- I I . History of Verse and Prose . As a literary medium, vate prose rhythm, his motive is to attract to prose the verse develops earlier than prose. Archaeological evi- attention people devote to verse. As Cicero later reports dence indicates that music, dance, and *song played (Orator ), “When [Isocrates] observed that people critical roles in the lives of our prehistoric ancestors. listened to orators with solemn attention, but to poets Our earliest surviving poetic texts, which date from with pleasure, he is said to have sought for rhythms to th and th c. bce and which appear on clay tablets use in prose as well” (trans.
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