I have made no secret of my bias towards prose. It is self-evidently the superior form of written composition, unsurpassed in clarity and accuracy. Verse is often constrained by meter, rhyme, and structures that don’t use much of the page. So it vexed me for many years that large swathes of literature were in such an awkward format. This is because of one very silly disconnect that I admittedly should have realized many a year ago. I did finally have the epiphany of what utility verse had while driving down some highway or another listening to audiobooks.

And then it faded to the back of my minds while more pressing matters came to the fore. A recent argument slap fight discussion in the comments about copyright reminded me again. The function of the constraints of verse in line length, meter, and rhyme is to act as a mnemonic. Verse exists not for the sort poetry of the leasure classes, but so that the illiterate storyteller can hold the epic yarn in his brain and retell it at the pace his audience needs to be entertained. Sitting here in a modern environment, especially using a text-based format like this website, I can easily forget that literacy was not the norm. Prose is the superior written form, but it is a bitch to memorize.

So on to introspection. Why did I overlook such an obvious connection for so many years?

My first instinct is to blame the way I was taught. Being a victim graduate of the public school system, I had to contend with instructors whose first priority was not the students. So when the curriculum required they cover verse, they picked examples to work with that were A: short, and B: appealed to the instructor. It would not be a stretch to assume that in most cases, an education degree-holding, usually female, adult will have a different taste in entertainment from pre-teen to teenage students, especially the boys. So when verse came up, we would often get florid little snippets from some eighteenth or nineteenth century fop. To us it was boring and painful. The only good poem (from our perspective) to grace the curriculum was The Raven, which I can probably recite large chunks of from memory to this day.

Now if we had something from the epics like Gilgamesh, Homer, the Eddas, or even Beowulf, the subject matter would have resonated better with our young minds. Unfortunately, those were not composed in anything resembling modern english. With the upswing in general literacy even among the lower classes between Tudor and modern times (due to things like the printing press), the niche for memorized epics went away. No one composed new ones in verse, turning their attentions to the superior written form. Naturally, translations of the existing epic verse were less interested in making them memorizable and instead were for well-educated types to dissect ad nausium. That left the translations not exactly fitting into the verse format, and limping along as not fully realized prose.

Of course, even if there were a modern epic verse, I am now of the mind that if that were given to the english teachers of today, it would be tortured to the point of once again boring the students out of their skulls. That is, if it even made it to the classroom, given the proclivities of ‘educators’ today. As a thought experment, I keep seeing the flaws in such an idea. I toyed with the idea of putting together a sample of what such a poem might look like, and ran into the problem that I do not take readily to verse. Nothing made the page as it fell apart in my head.

This is why I fix computers instead.

With no good way to close out the stream of consciousness ramble, I leave you with Beowulf, in the original English.