What, then, is verse? What is free verse? How can a writer create a plodding or dancing or galloping rhythm? What is it that makes the verse of Milton or Keats or Hopkins musically more satisfying than that of McGonagall or many In Memoriam tributes in your local newspaper? These are some of the questions I hope to answer.
Whereas in Africa, for example, traditional oral literature is composed not in verse, but in a medium closer to everyday speech, in all European cultures whose early literature survives, the earliest known is entirely in verse. There is an obvious reason for this. Literature began as an oral art: clearly verse is more easily memorized than most other spoken language, as it has a more distinctive sound pattern. We must remember, too, that prose is a form of written language, and early literature predates writing. Very often the earliest written records we have — of the Greek poems attributed to Homer, for example, or the Anglo-Saxon adventure poem Beowulf— enshrine oddities of grammar and vocabulary which reveal that they contain texts that were composed long before, sometimes centuries before, the date of the manuscript. The poems, or parts of them, may therefore have been transmitted orally for hundreds of years before writing was developed. Often the written version contains various attempts to update the language a little so that it should not seem too antique to its readers or audience (much as a twentieth-century edition of Shakespeare has largely twentieth-century punctuation and spelling, and yet retains many words and grammatical forms which died out of common use long ago).
Since the earliest European verse predates the widespread use of writing, it clearly derives from spoken language and not from any written form of language.
It would, perhaps, be useful here to consider again a few working definitions of common terms.
Speech is the first form of language to develop. In Indo-European languages, speech consists largely of lexical items, or words, and also of grammatical items (such as the plural inflections -s and -en), all woven together in a patterned structure the rules for which are called grammar. The essential qualities of speech are its spontaneity and flexibility: we can utter completely new pieces of speech at will. From speech are derived both verse and prose.
Prose is language which is written to be read — silently or aloud — and has a few special rules of grammar not normally found in spontaneous speech. For example, in prose sentences are usually explicit and complete: information that in speech is signalled by facial and vocal expression, gesture and body language is in prose conveyed in words. In prose you often find grammatical shapes that are rare in spontaneous speech (such as an although clause preceding a main clause).
Verse is language intended to be listened to, even if printed in a book for widespread transmission, and it is patterned in a special way according to the rules of metre. The word metre simply means “measure”, and what is measured is not the same in all languages. In French verse, for example, syllable counting is the basis of metre, and classical Latin metre consisted of specially patterned groupings of long and short syllables. In English verse, metre depends on stress.