A lecture delivered at Unity College in Maine on 24 March 2010
By Lewis Turco
The oldest “poem” in the Western world, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is also the oldest “novel.” An “epic” is a long narrative that tells of the fabulous exploits of a person who is often of superhuman stature and nature like the Chaldean “protagonist” or hero of Gilgamesh whose semi-divine hero was the sovereign of the city of Erech in ancient Babylonia. It was written in Mesopotamia, the area of Iraq, perhaps six thousand years ago, and it was written in prose, like the poetry of the later Bible, such as the “Song of Songs” and the Psalms of David. Here we have two terms that need to be explained right off the bat: “poetry” and “prose.”
What is poetry? It is a genre, a type or kind of literature like other genres such as fiction, drama, and nonfiction. Gilgamesh is a prose epic, written in grammatical parallels — particular sentence forms, but most epics of the western world are written in verse, like the work of the problematic Greek poet Homer who may or may not actually have lived or written either of the epics attributed to him, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Such narratives as these and the anonymous Old English Beowulf are sometimes called “primary epics” or “folk epics.” A “secondary,” “art,” or “literary epic” is one whose author is definitely known, as for instance The Aeneid of Vergil, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained by John Milton, and John Brown’s Body by Stephen Vincent Benet.
What, then, is prose? It is one of the two modes of writing, the other of which is verse. How are they different? Prose is unmeasured language, whereas verse is measured language. People didn’t get around to measuring language until much more recently in history than when Gilgamesh or the Bible were written. How does one measure language? Depending on the language, one counts elements of it, such as syllables in English and other Western vernacular languages like Italian, or French, or German (as distinguished from “classical languages” like Sanscrit, Greek, or Latin from which many vernacular languages are descended).
What is the difference between prose and poetry? Given these definitions, there can be only one answer: prose is a mode of writing, and poetry is a genre of writing. All right, then we need to define “poetry” and distinguish it from the other genres like “fiction,” which is the art of storytelling, and “drama,” which is the art of acting out a story, and “nonfiction,” which is the art of exposition, of explaining something. That leaves “poetry” to be defined. What is it?
Some people would define poetry as the art of song. Well, but Gilgamesh is a story, not a song, isn’t it? Yes, but before there was such a thing as written language, there was only spoken language, or in the case of both stories and poems, sung language, and a story or a poem had to be remembered so that it could be passed on to later generations; therefore it was recited or sung to a musical accompaniment. Without a doubt, Gilgamesh and Beowulf both were originally performed as songs or chants, just as were “The Song of Songs, which Is Solomon’s” and “The Psalms of David” — in fact, “psalm” means “song.”
What does song do that the other genres don’t do? It relies heavily on particular language effects, such as chime, which would include rhyme and rhythm. We won’t go into rhyme and other mnemonic devices — that is, aids to remembrance — like assonance, alliteration, consonance, dissonance, and so forth, but we need to discuss rhythm which is the flow of cadences in language. “Cadence” is the “modulation or inflection of the voice” such as that “implied by the structure and ordering of words and phrases” in speech or writing. For instance, if one writes a prose sentence such as, “I hear the cowboy singing as he rides his pony alone over the plain,” we can hear cadences, for certain words and syllables are emphasized more than others: “I hear the cowboy singing as he rides his pony alone over the plain.”
The first element in this sentence that is stressed is the one-syllable verb “hear”; the second is “cow,” the first syllable of the noun “cowboy” because that’s simply the way we pronounce the word, with the stress on the first syllable; ditto for “sing” in “singing”; “rides” is another one-syllable verb; the first syllable of “pony” is stressed, but it’s the second syllable of the adverb “alone” that takes the stress, then back to the first syllable of the two-syllable adverb “over,” and finally the one-syllable noun “plain.” Now, if we take this pattern and repeat it, we will hear the cadences repeated as well, the rhythms:
I hear the cowboy singing as he rides
his pony alone over the plain,
I hear the mother singing as she rocks
her baby in its cradle,
I hear the shoemaker singing as he
pounds the shoe upon his last,
I hear the sailor singing as he climbs the mast of his scudding ship,
and so forth and so on, just as Walt Whitman did it in his poem titled “I hear America Singing”:
I hear America singing,
the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each
one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing
his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as
he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what
belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as
he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song,
the plowboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of
the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what
belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to
the day — at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
This is a poem written in prose; it obviously has rhythm, but its language is not measured because Whitman was not counting the elements of the language, in this case, the syllables in his sentences; he was repeating a model sentence structure. But if we return to our original sentence, the first half of it at least, and we count the syllables, we’ll find that there are ten syllables in it:
I hear the cow boy sing ing as he rides = 10
Then, if we add the stresses, an odd thing happens to the word “as”:
I hear the cowboy singing as he rides —
we hear it take a stress, not a very strong one, but a secondary stress, because we expect to hear one there now that we have isolated the first half of the sentence and notice that the cadence seems to call for a stress on every other syllable, which gives us what we call a series of iambs, five of them in this case. And if we carry on with this pattern, it becomes clear that what we are doing is measuring the lines, not just repeating prose sentence structures:
I
hear the cowboy singing as he rides,
The
mother singing as she rocks her child,
The
sailor singing in the howling wind,
The leatherworker singing at his last.
Both examples are poetry; one is written in prose, the other is written in verse. Let me take a moment to make an observation about what people call “free verse” — there is no third mode called “free verse,” because language is either measured (we call it “metered”), or it is not. Dividing prose sentences into “lines” by cutting them into phrases, clauses, and so forth, does not turn them into verse, because we are not measuring the lines:
I hear the cowboy singing
as he rides his pony alone
over the plain,
I hear the mother singing
as she rocks her baby
in its cradle,
I hear the shoemaker singing
as he pounds the shoe
upon his last,
I hear the sailor singing
as he climbs the mast
of his scudding ship.
This is a prose poem, NOT a “free verse” poem.
The point to be made here is that any of the genres of literature may be written in either of the modes, prose or verse. There may be prose poetry or verse poetry; prose drama or verse drama; prose essays or verse essays. Any of the genres may even be written in combinations of prose or verse, but the difference between prose and poetry is that prose is a mode and poetry is a genre. And the difference between poetry and verse is that poetry is a genre and verse is a mode.
Gilgamesh was written in prose, but Beowulf was written in accentual or strong stress verse, called Anglo-Saxon prosody. Besides Beowulf, which is the oldest European epic written in a vernacular tongue, several later narratives were also written in strong stress verse, such as William Langland’s The Vision of Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Anglo-Saxon prosody has continued to be written fitfully over the centuries, even in contemporary times.
The basis for accentual verse is the counting of stressed or accented syllables in a line of verse, paying no attention to the number of unstressed syllables. In every word of the English language of two or more syllables, like the stressed syllables we identified in the words cowboy and singing, at least one syllable will take a stress. If you cannot at first hear the stressing, then you may consult a pronouncing dictionary. Important single-syllable words, particularly verbs (like “hear” and “rides”) and nouns generally take strong stresses. Unimportant single-syllable words in the sentence, such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns (except demonstrative pronouns like “this” and “those”) do not take strong stresses, although they may take secondary stresses through promotion or demotion, depending on their position in the sentence or the line of verse: in any series of three unstressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through promotion and will stand in place of a stressed syllable (the word as was promoted in the line about the cowboy). In any series of three stressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through demotion and will stand in place of an unstressed syllable. An accent may be forced upon a syllable through rhetorical stress, by underlining, italicizing, boldfacing, or otherwise artificially heightening it, as has just now been done.
Next, we are going to read a modern version of a famous poem written in Anglo-Saxon prosody. The features of this particular form of strong stress accentual verse are these: each line (called a stich) of verse) contains four stresses; two or three of these syllables are overstressed by means of alliteration. This term means that the first syllable of a word is accented, first, by means of pronunciation (that is, the way in which we ordinarily pronounce the word — with the accent on the first syllable, like cowboy), and, second, by means of the repetition of consonant sounds (that is, in two or more words the stressed first syllable begins with a sound of the alphabet other than the vowels a, e, i, o, or u.
Besides the four strong stresses in the stich and the alliterations, each stich is broken in half by a pause called a caesura. This pause is built into the poem in one way or another. Here is the anonymous Old English poem “The Wanderer,” and it is followed by a portion of Beowulf; both are written in a modern versions by “Wesli Court,” the anagram pseudonym under which I write most of my traditionally formal poems:
Alone
I am driven · each day
by dawn
To wake and wander, · to cry my cares.
Now there are none · among the quick [living]
To
whom I dare · to bare
my heart,
Tell
my thought. Too truly I ken [know]
That
in a man it is no vice
To
keep his counsel chest-locked,* [private]
Hold
close his mind-hoard.* [thoughts]
No
weary wit may scorn weird, [fate]
Nor
wrecked will work hope;
Wherefore,
belike, fame-chasers
Fasten
darkness in deep moods;
Therefore,
I must curb my mind —
Cut
off from kindred, cast from country,
Care-overborne
— bind it in fetters,
For
long ago the ground's grip* [burial]
Took
my weal-lord. Wretched, I went, [patron]
Winter-drear,
over the wave.
I
sought the hall of a gold-giver [patron
again, employer]
Where,
far or near, I might find
Him
whose meadhall would host the castaway,
Grant
comfort to one cursed,
Hail
me heartily.
He
who struggles
Knows
how cruel a companion is care
To
him who has few shield-friends.* [fellow
warriors]
The
path presses him, no purse of gold;
Not
Midgard's glory, but heart's cavern. [Earth's]
He
recalls hall-men, treasure-sharing;
In
youth-yore his loaf-lord* [patron]
Sat
him to feast. This joy is fallen.
He
who is forced to forgo the word
Of
his liege-lord learns this lore:
How
sleep and sorrow, twined together,
Bind
in a bight the bitter outcast.
Dwelling
in dream, he and his lord
Clasp
and kiss, lay on knee
Hand
and head, as betimes
In
days dwindled, upon the gift-stool.
Then
he wakens, the forsaken man,
And
spies before him bleak spume;
Seamews
swimming, stroking feathers;
Swirling
hail; hoar-snow falling.
His
heart's wounds hurt anew
For
his loved lord. Grief blossoms.
The
wraiths of kinsmen gather in thought;
He
cries out gladly, scans eagerly
The
throngs of his hearth — they scud away.
Long-boatmen's
ghosts bring not many
Old
lays there. Care freshens
In
him who sends forward too oft
His
warm heart over weary tides.
In
Midgard I wit not why [know
not]
My
mind is not mired
When
it roves the lives of earls,
How
in a stroke they forswore their halls,
Those
mood-proud* theigns. Thus does
Midgard, [lords]
Each
day and all, age and fall.
No
man is wise who has not won
His
winters-lore.* The wise man bides, [wisdom]
Not
hot-hearted, nor speech-hasty,
Nor
weak in war, nor wanting in reckoning,
Nor
too goods-grasping, too glad, too mild, [greedy]
Nor
boast-breasted,* before he kens.
The
sage forbears folly-boasting* [braggartry]
Till
fierce wit fully wots. [knows]
Which
wind will take his spleen.
A
wise man grasps how grim
This
world shall be when its wealth wastes,
Even
as now, in numberless places,
Earth's
walls fall, wind-riven,
Rimed
with hoar-ruined houses.
The
wine-halls moulder; their wrights lie
In
wolfbane, their bandsmen slain
Under
the tower. The sword took some
In
its course; a bird carried
One
over Ocean; one the werewolf
Dealt
to death; one stretched
His
drear-eyed earl in an earthen trench.
The
Man-Maker* has marred this hearth [God]
So
men's laughter has sunk to stillness:
That
wight who looked on these walls wisely, [chap,
fellow]
Who
sounded deeply this dark life,
Would
hark back to the blood spilled,
Weigh
it well. His word would be,
"Where
is the steed that served these men?
Where
is the horde and the hoard-sharer?*
Where
is the fastness, the feast, the fanfare?"
Bright
Cup! Burnished knight!
Eager
earl! Your age tarnished
In
night's helm, torn out of time!
There
stands, instead of staunch theigns,
A
louring wall wrought with worm-wrines; [worm-furrows]
The
earls eat dust beneath the ash-spear —
Thirsty
biter! Their weird is proud.
Storms
stutter on the stone hill,
The
ground battered by bitter hail,
Weather-wrath.* Bleakness breaks
And
night-shade spreads, sends from the North
The
hobnail sleet to harry man.
In
Midgard all is crossed and melled; [meddled]
Weird's-will* wrenches the world. [fate]
Wealth
is our loan, friends our lending;
Mankind
is lent, kinsmen lent:
Earth's
frame shall stand forsaken.
In
this excerpt from Beowulf the champion of the Geats learns of the monster
Grendel who terrorizes Denmark, and he sails to help King Hrothgar:
In Geatland Beowulf, Higlac’s hallmate,
Greatest of the Geats, greater and stronger
Than any other anywhere else,
Heard that Grendel turned the halls
Of distant Heorot to scenes of horror.
He ordered a ship be readied to sail
Over the ocean, for he would help
Hrothgar the Dane in his hour of need.
The wise elders of the gathered Geats
Did not object, for the portents promised
Success for their hero in far Heorot,
They said farewell as he fared forth
With a chosen band of brave brothers.
Fourteen of the finest that could be found
Among the Geats who boarded their boat
And set sail on the wild waves,
Pointing their prow to distant Denmark
Far from their fjords, their familiar fields,
Coursing the currents beneath the cliffs,
Eager to find what would befall them
And their longboat laden with armor,
Lined with shields along the gunwales,
Their oaken hearts in their oaken vessel
Beating strongly as the wild wind
Hurled them beyond the foaming breakers
Until at last they saw in the sea,
Rising out of the furling froth,
Hills lifting their green heads
On the horizon, and soon they stood
Under those clifs where their cruise ended.
*These are "kennings," phrase metaphors, synonyms.
Clarinda Harriss. Truly fascinating. I'll read it many more times, not least because I am
much enamored of "Wesli"'s
translation of Beowulf.
I'm puzzled by
several things. One is this:
". . .the other genres like “fiction,” which is the art of storytelling,
and “drama,” which is the art of acting out a story, and “nonfiction,” which is
the art of exposition, of explaining something." Much nonfiction is narrative, i.e., storytelling. How does your distinction deal with
stories which are factual (and not necessarily told to expose or explain, but
simply to entertain?)?
Also — I'm not
clear about your distinction between poetry-in-prose-mode and 'free
verse.' Do you discount the
term "free verse" altogether?
(Fine by me, btw.)
Many thanks for a good and continuing read.
Lewis Turco. When you come right down to it, with the possible
exceptions of recipes and how-to items, all writing is fiction. Take the genre of writing we
call “history,” for example. What is it? It is not the manipulation of real events, obviously.
Rather, it is the manipulation of arbitrary written figures — words — that
stand for those events, which took place in the past. Moreover, those events
took place in many and various areas and eras of the earth, and they involved millions
of people each of whom experienced only a limited number of the events during
her or his lifetime, and saw those few events from a single, subjective
viewpoint.
Then what is it that
the historian does? She or he researches as many of the events of history as
are relevant to the study in hand, and that study will be limited. The sources
the historian uses will themselves be forms of fiction: documents written out
by various people, newspaper, journal, and book items, possibly even eyewitness
reports which will be accounts of particular events seen by single persons and
related from discrete points of view. All of it is narration, stories told by
people about the events they are trying to convey to an audience of readers or
viewers. Every account is subject to exaggeration, understatement, skewed
viewpoints caused by one’s political, religious and social beliefs, madnesses,
neuroticisms, axes to grind and so on and so forth. In the case of manuscripts,
especially before printing was invented and scribes had to make copies by hand,
errors crept into the texts generation by generation.
It is impossible for there to be such a
thing as “objectivity” in theology, history, journalism, philosophy, biography,
even (or perhaps one should say “especially”) in autobiography which depends
upon fallible memory, though one can attempt a neutral or an even-handed
approach to one’s subject. One will fail, of course, but one must sometimes
try.
The kinds of writing
— genres — listed in the previous paragraph are called “nonfiction” by many,
but in fact there is no distinction to be made between fiction and nonfiction.
The techniques and subjects of one are the subjects and techniques of the
other. In the early twenty-first century we even have such hybrid terms as
“nonfiction novel,” “docudrama,” “reality TV” (was there ever a form less
real?) and “infomercials,” not to mention old terms such as “film noir,”
“realism,” “eyewitness news,” and so forth.
All stories of any kind are concerned with one thing, and one thing only: human behavior. People dealing with human problems are the basis of all narratives, and a dramatic situation is necessary to any story. It is human conflict in which readers are interested, and that is true even if the protagonist is an animal, or a bird, or an insect, or any other sort of creature, for that creature will display human characteristics with which the reader or listener will sympathize or empathize.
Harriss. I'm with you on the questionable existence of "fact" or even
a reliable "reality."
Completely. Matter of
"fact,"I think only old-school historians would even question your
view of history. Perhaps we just
need an entirely new taxonomy in order to hold accountable for their
"fictions" those folks who claim A Large Black Man Held Them Up at
Gunpoint when in fact they gambled away those family jewels. Or to deal with folks who deny the
non-fiction status of the Holocaust. (Yeah, dangerous, this does suggest
"nonfiction" is "consistent with agreed-on reality".) On
the other hand, and I think this is what you imply, and I pretty much agree,
that what we really have are the genres Narrative and Non-Narrative, and to hell
with "fact" or "fiction."
Oh yeah, I object like mad to "free verse." Oxymoron indeed. Free Verse = Poems without any form, chorus my students-- until I teach them No, that is not "free verse," that is LOUSY POETRY. Poetry in prose mode as opposed to verse mode (thank you for those terms!) will have some 'form" (of theme, language, rhythm, metaphor, all the above) unless it is BAD poetry.
Turco.
As to the term “free verse” you bet I object to it. It’s not even an oxymoron —
it’s a simple contradiction in terms.
