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-heroicDon 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 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.
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.
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.
^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'.
^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'.
^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).
^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.
External links
Media related to
Verse novels at Wikimedia Commons