Verse novel

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.

History

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-fuisich (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 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 an American 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.

Versification

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.

Recent examples

Novels in verse for teens

See also

References
  1. For discussion of the basic categorical issues see The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), s.v. 'Narrative Poetry'.
  2. The upturn is noted in J. A. Cuddon, ed., A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (4th ed., rev. C. E. Preston, Oxford & malden, MA: Blackwells, 1998; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), s.v. 'verse-novel'.
  3. These geographical clusters are noted and discussed in the editorial introduction to Ralph Thompson, View from Mount Diablo, An Annotated Edition (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, & Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2009).
  4. For detailed discussion of the Onegin stanza see the introduction in Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin. Translated from the Russian, with a Commentary by Vladimir Nabokov (rev. ed., in 4 vols, London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1975), especially i.10 ff..
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