Prosody

So I was having a long conversation with friends about my beef with modern verse, and I realized about half way through that I wasn't expressing myself as well as I wanted (alcohol may have been involved). So I thought I'd lay out my thoughts at greater length (and more soberly).

For purposes of convenience I will refer to poetry as written (roughly) by and after the Modernists as "modern verse" and poetry written prior to that time as "traditional verse," recognizing that those categories are porous (isolated free verse examples can be found in the 18th century, etc.).

The Argument in Summary

Some modern verse is barely verse as a generic matter, and I wish it were called something else to facilitate critical discussion. Of the available descriptors in use, I think the least bad genre descriptor to describe most modern poetry is prose poetry, but a better term would be welcome.

The Negative Argument (Ruling Some Things Out)

A) Free Verse Can Certainly Be Poetry

I am not arguing that only poems with fixed meters and/or rhyme schemes are verse. Lots of free verse is, in my opinion, clearly and definitely poetry, and some of my personal favorite poets do not rely on fixed metric or rhyme schemes (see, e.g., T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, etc.).

B) Modern Verse is not Artistically Inferior

I am also not arguing that modern verse is somehow inferior to traditional verse as an artistic matter. I am arguing that its a basically different art form that should either have its own separate genre descriptor, or possibly should be viewed as a sub-genre of prose.

The Argument at Length

Features of Traditional Verse

Traditional verse (in the language traditions with which I'm familiar, but counterexamples are sincerely welcomed) is conventionally defined by either:

Some deliberate repetition of sounds, such as rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, etc. or
Some repeating patterns or rhythms involving characteristics of morae or syllables. These take various forms in different languages and rely on patterns of vocalic stress, syllable quantity ("long" versus "short" syllables), syllable counting, tone, or other features, either alone or in combination.

Some examples:

Traditional English poetry employed accentual-syllabic meter (patterns of stress and syllable counting), and also employed end rhyme.
Latin poetry employed syllable quantity and syllable counting, but did not require rhyme or other repetition of sound.
Classical Haiku employed morae/syllable counting, but required no repeated sounds.
Traditional Arabic poetry involved both syllable counting and/or fixed rhyme schemes.
Early Germanic verse traditions relied on a combination of syllable stress/counting and alliteration (rather than rhyme).

To summarize, traditional verse, as a genre, required some kind of repetition of sound, patterns of sound, or both. I view those two sonic features as essential to the definition of verse; they are the features that meaningfully distinguish poetry from prose. Modern verse sometimes clearly exhibits those features--Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, or Hughes's Dream Deferred are both excellent examples of modern verse that clearly employ both repeated sounds and rhythmic patterns, but that do not rely on a fixed meter or rhyme scheme to do so.

Often, however, modern verse lacks any deliberate repetition of sound or any repeating syllabic patterns or rhythms. That kind of modern verse is, to my mind, just prose that's been broken up into more lines than usual. The only thing that signifies to a reader that the text is poetry is a visual indicator (enjambment), rather than a sonic indicator. I contend that that kind of modern verse isn't actually poetry, it's another thing entirely or an alternative formatting choice for prose.

An Imperfect Analogy

So I'm arguing that the defining feature of verse is related to patterns of sound, either through sound structure or repetition or both. In that respect traditional verse has much in common with music, which typically also involves sound structures and repetition in the form of rhythm, melody, etc.¹

To follow the music analogy for a moment, when people talk about "musicality" they often distinguish music from random sounds by making reference to structural elements like rhythm, melody, and harmony. Most (but not all) music involves some kind of sound pattern (that may or may not change throughout the piece), some kind of sound repetition, or both. That said, music clearly exists that deliberately eschews rhythmic patterns or repetition of sounds, such as certain varieties of experimental, ambient or jazz music.²

To complete the analogy, my take is that a significant portion of modern verse is the poetical equivalent of an unaccompanied arhythmic Jazz drum solo or harsh noise wall music. Common listener complaints about extreme experimental music and the freer end of free jazz are that they are "formless" or "not very musical."

That, in a nutshell, is my complaint about much of modern verse: the kind of prosodic "music" I described above is, in my view, the defining feature of poetry, but modern verse is often not very poetic in that technical sense.³ I'm not suggesting it isn't high-quality art; I just don't think it's poetry.

Thanks for coming to my cranky-assed TED Talk!

Footnotes:

The analogy is especially instructive because music and poetry are deeply related as art forms. In many cultures, traditional verse was often sung rather than recited (e.g., Latin and Ancient Greek), and significant quantities of verse have been either written for music or later set to music. The word sonnet means "little song", etc. As an aside, I would argue that much of the new traditional verse being written today is in the form of song lyrics.

Although even in those genres, there are often sections where deliberate patterns emerge or sounds are deliberately repeated, if for no other reason to serve as contrast to the unstructured portions. As an example, the traditional Jazz solo is typically anchored by the rest of the ensemble keeping time in the meanwhile.

The obvious fault in my analogy is that those music genres are still clearly music, whereas I'm making the case that prose poetry isn't really poetry. I'd address that criticism by noting there is a less structured (but still structured) genre in the same textual medium as poetry (i.e. prose), but there is no similar less structured sound genre alongside music. Below a certain threshold of organization, people just call less structured sound "noise," which, to come full circle, is a label embraced by many experimental musicians for that reason.