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The distinction between prose and verse has long been accepted; the distinction between prose and poetry has often been discussed. The two lines of demarcation have not been allowed to coincide. It is a habit of our easier culture to say that poetry can be written in prose, except that since the nineties ‘prose-poems’ have gone a little out of fashion. Passages from Sir Thomas Browne or Traherne or Ruskin are quoted as defining an exaltation which is one with poetic exaltation; and even passages of a less exalted but more simple or tender kind in Hardy or Alice Meynell are gathered under the same heading. ‘Poetry can be written in prose’; and only the uneducated childlike mind is allowed to suppose that the pattern of lines makes any difference. None of us are willing to acknowledge ourselves mere babes in culture and therefore we believe all this and repeat it.

Certainly when in years we were children, before we knew that culture existed, we recognized poetry by its lines. A poetry book was one in which the printing did not go straight on, covering the whole page, but stopped short and began again, probably with a capital letter. All printing of that recognizable kind was poetry; we knew nothing of the sad distinction between poetry and verse. But then, as we grew older, they robbed us of our simplicity. There was verse which was not poetry; well, that was, after all, only a difference in quality which the unfortunate young discover to exist—semper, ubique, in omnibus. But then there was prose which was poetry. And that instruction, though no doubt it gave some prose a title to which it had at least a partial claim, left a sadness behind. Poetry was no longer to be known by its lines; the mere magical look of the thing meant nothing. But why then write in lines?

It was discovered, later on, to be more fun, especially if lines (in those far-off days) involved rhymes, and stanzaic arrangements. Also it confined and defined one’s impulse, one’s labour, and one’s result. To write a poem was a more simple and satisfactory thing than to write a piece of prose. There was a reason for writing it, merely because it was complete in itself, a poem. It was also, whether the fact were recognized or not, easier. Prose betrayed us more easily than verse. The lines, the rhymes, the stanzas concealed, by the thrill that their discovery gave us, the lack of any thrill communicated by ourselves. We were astonished, within ourselves, to find that ‘adore’ and ‘more’ rhymed in our poem as well as in Lovelace, and that we could provide them with a fresh reason for rhyming. Lovelace had not seen our sunrise or our young lady, and our innocence combined with our ignorance to write verse. But all such reasons did not alter the truth that poetry (they said) could be written in prose, and that the lovely arrangement of lines was a sign of verse, but not of poetry.

Yet were we after all so wrong? Is it not possible still to hold that poetry is power communicated by words in verse, and prose is power communicated by words not in verse? Have stanzas, couplets, and lines nothing whatever to do with poetry? Or is there something still to be said for maintaining not merely that poetry is and ought to be a word used in opposition to the word prose, but that verse is necessarily a part of poetry and necessarily is not a part of prose?

Verse is a general name given to many different arrangements of single and, in some sense, self-sufficient lines compacted together and related between themselves. Sometimes their relation is further demonstrated by rhyme; sometimes it is not. But it has always been demonstrated by the varying lengths and stresses of the lines. Yes, but prose also is composed of words, variously stressed, arranged in varying lengths. What then is the difference?

The difference would seem to be simple—in verse the reader is deliberately referred to a chosen measure; in prose he is not so referred. That reference—whether it be to the normal decasyllabic line of traditional blank verse, or any one among our innumerable stanzaic forms, or the couplet, or even to a deliberate irregularity—is made known to him by the verse itself, and is ostentatiously insisted on by the verse itself. The ostentation is a part of the verse. It is a necessary part of verse that one line should be a vivid conditioning of the next, and that on arriving at the next, the reader should remain vividly aware of that past power thus conditioning him. But the reader of prose sentences is by no means so memorably conditioned. Or to put it in another way—in reading verse one always refers back sensationally to the preceding line and is aware of that reference; in prose if one refers it is without so acute an awareness. One is, in prose, conditioned, but one is not by any means so intensely aware of the pattern of that conditioning, of the unit and units of the immediate past, because the variation and relation between the various ‘lengths’ of the writing is not deliberately ostentatious.

No doubt a reader with sufficiently sensitive ears could follow the relations of all the sentences in Gulliver’s Travels and could perhaps detect at last a ‘basic sentence’ on which all the actual sentences are variations. No doubt a less gifted but still sensitive reader would carry in his mind the vibrations of all the sentences in the last page or two of whatever book he was reading, and be wisely aware that they prepared him for the next sentence, and in what relation that next sentence stood to its past. But it might, I think, be allowed that prose does not insist on this reference as verse does; and that when prose does forget itself and too quickly remind us of its immediate past we consider it as unsatisfactory as we do poetry which does not so remind us. There is not—except for scientists—a continually reimposed unit of sensation in prose; there is in verse. There is metre—the measurement of that unit—in verse. Identity vehemently exists beneath the variableness of the one, but not of the other.

But what then does this extra quality of verse which may be called the repetition of the pattern, the quality of which the measure is its metre—what does it do for us? It gives us, certainly, an added delight; it is, when it is well done, more fun. Paradise Lost is much more fun written in blank verse than it would be in prose, or is so to any one capable of enjoying that particular kind of fun. Let us have all the delights of which we are capable. But is this fun anything more than the artistic ingenuity of Milton in discovering so many variations on his basic line? Yes, it gives us an additional experience, the experience of deliberate choice, imposed upon us, deliberately demanding the assent of our own choice, and ostentatiously reminding us that Milton’s harmonization of all his elements is Miltonic and not natural, imperative and not persuasive, the reflection of the limitation of man’s nature magnificently worked into the very stuff of the poem. But prose does not so magnificently remind us of man’s limitation.

It is an experience of deliberate choice. If a poet writes a poem he discovers and assents to the form that poem is to take. He agrees to a proposal which his mind, or something greater than his mind, makes to him. The agreement is often so delightful and so laborious that the mere fact of agreement is lost in the physic of his pain, in both the pain and the physic. But in effect he determines to know the subject of his poem so, and not otherwise; so—by that particular measurement of discovery and definition. In that effort assuredly the subject changes; it becomes no more the experience of imagined fact, but the poetic result. It abandons actuality for poetry. For, among other reasons, it has absorbed into itself not merely the fact but the poet experiencing the fact, and has made a harmony of both—has indeed made a new thing of both which is to us a new experience^[1]. It has therefore taken into itself the nature of the poet and has made that a necessary part of the poem; and this it has done by its rhythms and their metre, its stanzaic form, its rhymes, its diction, and what not. But of all these characteristics the one which most immediately, most swiftly, and most continuously assists that change of subject and imposes the new thing on us is the distinction of the rhythmical form.

Certainly diction has a great deal to do with it, and diction is a great element of prose as well as of poetry. But diction, if it can be called a pattern at all, is a remoter pattern, and less immediately sensational. Form of diction depends for its recognition far more on the reader’s chance capacity than does the rhythmical form. Its ostentation and its imposition are more consonant with his own power, the amplitude of his mind (in Wordsworth’s phrase). The rhythmical form will no doubt give him additional gratification according as his mind becomes more ample, and may reach states in which a great amplitude is necessary before it can be properly understood. But so long as this rhythmical form divides itself into lines and prints itself so (presumably because of some inner necessity of its nature), so long it makes ostentation a part of its very existence in a way in which prose does not. Prose pretends and tends to subdue its own method of existence to its business of dealing with the reader, but poetry desires and determines to subdue the reader to its own method of existence. It is why we call Swift good prose, and Milton good poetry.

This ostentation and imposition then, this pattern of measured arrangement, this conditioning of the present and the future by the immediate past, this reference to the identity of a basic fact, is an imperative part of verse, and being the poet’s choice conveys his choice into our experience. It has developed an element of its style into an ostentation and an imposition, and made it of the first importance to its own being. There is therefore a limitation of which, in verse, we are more acutely aware than in the most exalted—or otherwise effective—prose. The ostentatious pattern is an expansion and a limitation at once; it gives us a more complex effect in the resulting poem, and enables us to realize more swiftly and fully the fact that this is how the original subject is being known. It helps therefore the individual effect, and compels us to realize that the subject has been known in this way. Certainly when we read the poem we are not allowed so to divide those effects, for it is neither the pattern nor the subject of which we are separately aware, but the resultant whole. But they may be spoken of separately for the purpose of justly apprehending the whole. And, so speaking, we may understand that the limitation by the pattern is in itself a further enlargement, for it gives us—what we may be less apt to retain in all but very exalted prose—the sense that things are known by man according to his own nature. Prose, especially sweet and rational prose, conceals its human limitations. It may argue or instruct or exhort, but all that while it subdues or hides from us the pattern which is our reminder that its conclusions are what they are because of its own limitations—which are its writer’s—which are in the nature of man. Man cannot know things by any means but through his own nature, and it is that nature in its thousand different capacities, but still only man’s, which the pattern of poetry makes ostentatious to us. Let the rhythms be as subtle and complex and subdued as we will, let the metre be irregular, let the relation of the lines be violent or harsh, let silence or clangour be part of that relation, still in any piece of writing which is meant to be read as verse rather than prose, the fact of the pattern, imposed upon us however gently, ostentatious before us however quietly, presents us in its very sensation with the ineluctable fact that man only apprehends his experiences according to his own nature. It refers us continually back to its unit, and its unit is the decision of its writer. It is that fact which poetry willingly embraces; and that from which prose, as it were, turns away. Therefore when the direct metre of verse appears in the midst of the indirect metre of prose, when a prose paragraph breaks into blank verse, we feel the intrusion undesirable, for we are violently reminded of what we have been encouraged to forget.

It is true that, though the pattern thus recalls us to the individual choice, it makes that choice in turn impersonal. The patterns of our English verse have been often—too often—repeated; it may be that our frailty is by now weary of them for a century or so. But while they existed they imposed themselves on us as something more impersonal than any movement of prose, at the same time that their mere adoption reminded us of the personal decision. The sonnet is an example. To read those arrayed rhymes, with the octave and sestet, is to be intensely aware that some particular thing exists so, and that the arrangement, which is non-rational, is a necessary part of that thing. It is a personal choice among impersonal patterns, and both adjectives impose upon us their corresponding qualities. In both the effect differs from prose, for in prose those qualities are derived from our reading instead of being known as a primary condition of our reading.

It might therefore be possible to use the words poetic and prosaic with a definite intention of separating two methods of writing of which the one does and the other does not ostentatiously insist on a certain fact in the nature of writing itself, and therefore in the nature of experience itself. In that sense a poem would reasonably be regarded, as in fact we have tended to regard it, as a greater thing than a piece of prose—other facts being equal. For it is precisely a fuller experience; it takes man’s limitation and makes that explicitly a part of his total sensation. It avoids the last illusion of prose, which so gently sometimes and at others so passionately pretends that things are thus and thus. In poetry they also are thus and thus, but because the arrangement of the lines, the pattern within the whole, will have it so; the magnificence of its assertion is made magnificent by its own limitation, and we know at once what we know, how we know it, and that we cannot know it outside our own nature, which in our lives is the thing that makes a pattern of our experience. In life it is no doubt wise to be very careful that we do not attempt to impose too easy and repetitive a pattern on the vast of experience. But we cannot avoid beginning with some kind of pattern, however we vary and alter it, otherwise we should not know anything. So in art we proceed from flagrancy to subtlety. But in poetry through all the subtlety the flagrancy remains. Exquisitely leaning to an implied untruth, prose persuades us that we can trust our natures to know things as they are; ostentatiously faithful to its own nature, poetry assures us that we cannot—we know only as we can. If indeed we choose to believe that great poetry is in some incomprehensible sense native to the universe, that its justice is more accurate than that of prose, and more consistent with the things of which we only know that we know them so—that is our personal decision, and in effect a non-poetic decision: that is, it has nothing to do with the poetic genius. It may be more or less or equally important, but it is not the same. We cannot say that poetry is true except in the sense that we say that love or religion or any philosophy is true. But we can say that in its fullness there is no mightier experience—and few as mighty—known to man.

[1]

It is therefore extremely uncertain whether any poet ever conveys the emotion he set out to convey, though he is often stated to do merely that. He, as well as the reader, discovers something else in making the poem; he discovers (i) his own method of experiencing, (ii) his own method of communicating that experience. Here are three things that go to make up the result.