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A verse novel is a type of narrative poetry in which a novel-length narrative is told through the medium of poetry rather than prose. Either simple or complex stanzaic verse-forms may be used, but there will usually be a large cast, multiple voices, dialogue, narration, description, and action in a novelistic manner.
Verse narratives are as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh , the Iliad , and the Odyssey , but the verse novel is a distinct modern form. Although the narrative structure is similar to that of a novella, the organisation of the story is usually in a series of short sections, often with changing perspectives. Verse novels are often told with multiple narrators, potentially providing readers with a view into the inner workings of the characters' minds. Some verse novels, following Byron's mock-heroic Don Juan (1818–24) employ an informal, colloquial register. Eugene Onegin (1831) by Alexander Pushkin is a classical example, and with Pan Tadeusz (1834) by Adam Mickiewicz is often taken as the seminal example of the modern genre. [1]
The major nineteenth-century verse novels that ground the form in Anglophone letters include The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich (1848) and Amours de Voyage (1858) by Arthur Hugh Clough, Aurora Leigh (1857) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lucile (1860) by 'Owen Meredith' (Robert Bulwer-Lytton), and The Ring and the Book (1868-9) by Robert Browning. The form appears to have declined with Modernism, but has since the 1960s–70s undergone a remarkable revival. Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) takes the form of a 999-line poem in four cantos, though the plot of the novel unfolds in the commentary. Of particular note, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate (1986) was a surprise bestseller, and Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990) a more predictable success. [2] The form has been particularly popular in the Caribbean, with work since 1980 by Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, David Dabydeen, Kwame Dawes, Ralph Thompson, George Elliott Clarke and Fred D'Aguiar, and in Australia and New Zealand, with work since 1990 by Les Murray, John Tranter, Dorothy Porter, Lisa Jacobson, Chris Orsman, David Foster, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, and Robert Sullivan. [3] Australian poet-author Alan Wearne's Night Markets, and sequels, are major verse novels of urban social life and satire.
The Australian poet C. J. Dennis had great success in Australia during World War I with his verse novels The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915) and The Moods of Ginger Mick (1916). The first tells of an urban ruffian with a heart of gold who marries and becomes a father and a farmer in Melbourne, Australia, shortly before the start of World War I in 1914. The second is the story of another urban ruffian, and good friend of The Bloke, who enlists in the Australian Army, and dies in the early battles at Gallipoli in 1915.
The American author, poet, dramatist, screenwriter and suffragist and feminist, Alice Duer Miller published her verse novel, Forsaking All Others (1935), about a tragic love affair, and had a surprising hit with her verse novel, The White Cliffs (1940: later dramatised and filmed, but retaining and expanding the poems as voice-over narration, as The White Cliffs of Dover (1944). This told the story of a young American woman who goes to England in mid-1914, for a fortnight, falls in love with a British aristocrat, and marries him: he is killed in the last days of the First World War in 1918, and when World War II breaks out in 1939, she must decide whether or not to let her son join the army to fight for England. The story helped sway American sentiment towards helping the British, and was a best-seller. Miller's poem-chapters were mainly traditional couplets, quatrains, and sonnets. They used several different voices, as well as letters from different characters.
The parallel history of the verse autobiography, from strong Victorian foundation with Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805, 1850), to decline with Modernism and later twentieth-century revival with John Betjeman's Summoned by Bells (1960), Walcott's Another Life (1973), and James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), is also striking. The forms are distinct, but many verse novels plainly deploy autobiographical elements, and the recent Commonwealth examples almost all offer detailed representation of the (problems besetting) post-imperial and post-colonial identity, and so are inevitably strongly personal works.
There is also a distinct cluster of verse novels for younger readers, most notably Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust (1997), which won a Newbery Medal. Hesse followed it with Witness (2001). Since then, many new titles have cropped up, with authors Sonya Sones, Ellen Hopkins, Steven Herrick, Margaret Wild, Nikki Grimes, Virginia Euwer Wolff, Ann Warren Turner, Lorie Ann Grover, Brenda Seabrooke, Paul B. Janeczko, and Mel Glenn all publishing multiple titles. Debut YA authors, Holly Thompson, Cathy Ostlere, Sarah Tregay, and others have added new titles to the shelves in 2011. Thanhha Lai's Inside Out & Back Again (2011) won the National Book Award.
Verse novels exist in other languages as well. In Hebrew, for example, Maya Arad (2003) and Ofra Offer Oren (2023) published verse novels composed of sonnets.
Long classical verse narratives were in stichic forms, prescribing a metre but not specifying any interlineal relations. This tradition is represented in English letters by the use of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), as by both Brownings and many later poets. But since Petrarch and Dante complex stanza forms have also been used for verse narratives, including terza rima (ABA BCB CDC etc.) and ottava rima (ABABABCC), and modern poets have experimented widely with adaptations and combinations of stanza-forms.
The stanza most specifically associated with the verse novel is the Onegin stanza, invented by Pushkin in Eugene Onegin . It is an adapted form of the Shakespearean sonnet, retaining the three quatrains plus couplet structure but reducing the metre to iambic tetrameter and specifying a distinct rhyme scheme: the first quatrain is cross-rhymed (ABAB), the second couplet-rhymed (CCDD), and the third arch-rhymed (or chiasmic, EFFE), so that the whole is ABABCCDDEFFEGG. [4] Additionally, Pushkin required that the first rhyme in each couplet (the A, C, and E rhymes) be unstressed (or "feminine"), and all others stressed (or "masculine"). In the rhyme scheme notation capitalizing masculine rhymes, this reads as aBaBccDDeFeFGG. Not all those using the Onegin stanza have followed the prescription, but both Vikram Seth and Brad Walker notably did so, and the cadence of the unstressed rhymes is an important factor in his manipulations of tone.
A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem of a type invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem's subject, usually a famous person, and the remainder puts the subject in an absurd light or reveals something unknown or spurious about the subject. The rhyme scheme is AABB, and the rhymes are often forced. The line length and metre are irregular. Bentley invented the clerihew in school and then popularized it in books. One of his best known is this (1905):
Poetry, also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.
Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek writer, journalist, politician, poet and philosopher. Widely considered a giant of modern Greek literature, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in nine different years, and remains the most translated Greek author worldwide.
Eugene Onegin, A Novel in Verse is a novel in verse written by Alexander Pushkin. Onegin is considered a classic of Russian literature, and its eponymous protagonist has served as the model for a number of Russian literary heroes. It was published in serial form between 1825 and 1832. The first complete edition was published in 1833, and the currently accepted version is based on the 1837 publication.
Robert Herrick was a 17th-century English lyric poet and Anglican cleric. He is best known for Hesperides, a book of poems. This includes the carpe diem poem "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time", with the first line "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may".
"Jack and Jill" is a traditional English nursery rhyme. The Roud Folk Song Index classifies the commonest tune and its variations as number 10266, although it has been set to several others. The original rhyme dates back to the 18th century and different numbers of verses were later added, each with variations in the wording. Throughout the 19th century new versions of the story were written featuring different incidents. A number of theories continue to be advanced to explain the rhyme’s historical origin.
William Sydney Graham was a Scottish poet, who was often associated with Dylan Thomas and the neo-romantic group of poets. Graham's poetry was mostly overlooked in his lifetime; however, partly thanks to the support of Harold Pinter, his work was eventually acknowledged. He was represented in the second edition of the Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse and the Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry.
Terza rima is a rhyming verse form, in which the poem, or each poem-section, consists of tercets with an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: The last word of the second line in one tercet provides the rhyme for the first and third lines in the tercet that follows. The poem or poem-section may have any number of lines, but it ends with either a single line or a couplet, which repeats the rhyme of the middle line of the previous tercet.
The Golden Gate (1986) is the first novel by poet and novelist Vikram Seth. The work is a novel in verse composed of 590 Onegin stanzas. It was inspired by Charles Johnston's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
Tail rhyme is a family of stanzaic verse forms used in poetry in French and especially English during and since the Middle Ages, and probably derived from models in medieval Latin versification.
Edward Mendelson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work, including Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). He is also the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006), about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (2015).
This glossary of literary terms is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in the discussion, classification, analysis, and criticism of all types of literature, such as poetry, novels, and picture books, as well as of grammar, syntax, and language techniques. For a more complete glossary of terms relating to poetry in particular, see Glossary of poetry terms.
Babette Deutsch was an American poet, critic, translator, and novelist.
X. J. Kennedy is an American poet, translator, anthologist, editor, and author of children's literature and textbooks on English literature and poetry. He was long known as Joe Kennedy; but, wishing to distinguish himself from Joseph P. Kennedy, he added an "X" as his first initial.
This is a glossary of poetry.
Literary nonsense is a broad categorization of literature that balances elements that make sense with some that do not, with the effect of subverting language conventions or logical reasoning. Even though the most well-known form of literary nonsense is nonsense verse, the genre is present in many forms of literature.
Kensington Publishing Corp. is an American, New York–based publishing house founded in 1974 by Walter Zacharius (1923–2011) and Roberta Bender Grossman (1946–1992). Kensington is known as "America's Independent Publisher". It remains a multi-generational family business, with Steven Zacharius succeeding his father as president and CEO, and Adam Zacharius as general manager.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to poetry:
June Thunder is a 28-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was first published in book form in MacNeice's poetry collection The Earth Compels (1938). The poem begins with memories of idyllic summer days in the countryside - "the unenduring / Joys of a season" - before returning to the present and "impending thunder". June Thunder is written in a loose form of the sapphic stanza, with three lines set in falling rhythm followed by a shorter fourth line. The poem was anthologised in A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920-1940 (1941), edited by Cecil Day-Lewis and L.A.G. Strong, and Penguin New Writing No. 2.
Janet S. Wong is an American poet and author of children's books. She has written over 30 books, primarily poetry, picture books, and middle grade fiction. At the age of seven, she had an active imagination. She used this later in her life to write poetry and books. She is the co-creator of The Poetry Friday Anthology series and the Poetry Friday Power Book series, published by Pomelo Books. Her most recent book is HOP TO IT: Poems to Get You Moving, an anthology of 100 poems by 90 poets that focuses on the topics of movement, the pandemic, and social justice. She is the winner of the 2021 NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children, a lifetime achievement award considered the most prestigious award that a children's poet can receive.
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