Averse novel is a type ofnarrative poetry in which anovel-length narrative is told through the medium ofpoetry rather thanprose. Either simple or complexstanzaic verse-forms may be used, but there are usually a large cast, multiple voices, dialogue, narration, description, and action in a novelistic manner.
Verse narratives are as old as theEpic ofGilgamesh, theIliad, and theOdyssey, but the verse novel is a distinct modern form. Although the narrative structure is similar to that of anovella, the organization of the story is usually in a series of short sections, often with changing perspectives. Verse novels are often told withmultiple narrators, potentially providing readers with a view into the inner workings of the characters' minds. Some verse novels, followingByron'smock-heroicDon Juan (1818–24) employ an informal, colloquial register.Eugene Onegin (1831) byAlexander Pushkin is a classical example, and withPan Tadeusz (1834) byAdam Mickiewicz is often taken as the seminal example of the modern genre.[1]
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 dramatized and filmed, but retaining and expanding the poems as voice-over narration, asThe White Cliffs of Dover (1944).
The parallel history of the verse autobiography, from strong Victorian foundation withWordsworth'sThe Prelude (1805, 1850), to decline with Modernism and later twentieth-century revival withJohn Betjeman'sSummoned by Bells (1960), Walcott'sAnother Life (1973), andJames Merrill'sThe Changing Light at Sandover (1982), is also striking. The forms are distinct, but many verse novels plainly deploy autobiographical elements, and the recentCommonwealth 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) andOfra Offer Oren (2023) published verse novels composed ofsonnets.
Long classical verse narratives were instichic forms, prescribing a meter but not specifying any interlineal relations. This tradition is represented in English letters by the use ofblank verse (unrhymediambic pentameter), as by both Brownings and many later poets. But sincePetrarch andDante complex stanza forms have also been used for verse narratives, includingterza rima (ABA BCB CDC etc.) andottava 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 theOnegin stanza, invented byPushkin inEugene Onegin. It is an adapted form of theShakespearean sonnet, retaining the three quatrains plus couplet structure but reducing the meter toiambic tetrameter and specifying a distinctrhyme 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 therhyme 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 thecadence of the unstressed rhymes is an important factor in his manipulations of tone.
^For discussion of the basic categorical issues seeThe 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 toRalph 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 inEugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin. Translated from the Russian, with a Commentary byVladimir Nabokov (rev. ed., in 4 vols, London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1975), especially i.10 ff.
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