Prose and Verse

 Broadly understood, any literary writer--including those who write novels, short stories, and plays--is a poet. We tend to make a distinction, though. Poets write in verse; novelists and playwrights write in prose. And while when we typically think of poetry nowadays we think of lyric poetry, poetry also comes in the forms of epic poetry--and plays.

What is the difference between prose and verse? It's difficult to make the distinction with a majority of contemporary poems being written in free verse. While there are certainly free verse poems that are verse, there are also those that are really prose with line breaks. The existence or absence of line breaks is not what distinguishes prose from verse.

So what, then, does distinguish them?

What you are reading in this blog post is prose. You speak in prose. Prose is language walking. 

Verse is more rhythmic. It may have very regular rhythms--like Iambic--or is may have more irregular rhythms, or have rhythms created by alliteration or sentence structures or numbers of syllables. In all of these cases, though, the language isn't walking. It's dancing. 

Of course, one can dance one's walk, and walk one's dance. 

Novelists like William Faulkner definitely dance their walk. Hemingway's dance is more subtle. 

If you want to read truly prosaic prose, I recommend a good scientific article. 

Most formalist poetry is dancing language. Walt Whitman's poems are very much dancing, though he's introducing a new kind of rhythm. Postmodern poets like Bob Perelman make their poems walk to such a degree that one could call their works prose with line breaks. 

Poets like Perelman and Margaret Atwood have a strong tendency to write what I would call prose with line breaks. This creates other demands on their poems, meaning they have to find other ways to make their works "poems," but to me at least it's clear they're not writing in verse. The presence of line breaks doesn't make a work verse.

I do believe, though, that all literary works of art at least dance their walk. There has to be some kind of rhythm. How else could a work of literature be beautiful?