Abbott Ikeler on Blogger

            The prose medium gets a lot of bad press. Take the definition of the adjective   prosaic , for instance – “like prose, commonplace, lacking in poetic beauty.” Or, even worse,   prosy   – “showing no imagination, dull.” Oscar Wilde famously dismissed Robert Browning as a “prose” poet, suggesting his verse was a vast collection of lyrically dead lines. And, of course, when romance novelists make a self-conscious effort to inflate passages with ornate, pretentious diction, we ridicule it as “purple prose.”           All of which would seem to say prose is designed for and should limit itself to pedestrian purposes: narration, matter-of-fact description, rational debate, and the like. The music of language – certainly its sublime possibilities – should, on the other hand, be left to poetry and song to reveal. Or so the simplistic argument runs.   ...

           That has been the question for a very long time. A look at past and current practice among poets tells us the old debate shows no sign of a resolution.             Prosody among the Greeks and Romans was all about vowel-length or metric quantity, about beats to a line, usually six. For Homer and Virgil, in the  Iliad, Odyssey  and  Aeneid , epic vision called for great, sounding dactylic hexameters. For Ovid, even in the mixed genre of  Metamorphoses , it seemed the right form. And for Catullus and others who wrote shorter elegiac or erotic poetry, couplets that began in hexameter and ended in pentameter were thought more appropriate to their subject matter. But in every case, from Homer through the late Latin poets, the lines the ancients limned did not rhyme with each other.           In the half-...