Hidden Musicality: The Codependence of Poetry and Prose
Aliya Beaupain
A Crisis of Cognizance
The primary mistake that far too many writers make when approaching poetry and prose is to regard the fields as completely discrete entities. It’s an understandable misconception, especially given the way that poetry is approached in many traditional educational models. While prose is held up as the primary vehicle for accessible and effective storytelling, poetry is often introduced as a tangential, even superfluous field. Poems are regarded as problems to be solved, esoteric objects of speculation and analysis, rather than as the foundation for virtually every other branch of artistic literary expression.
While the form we conceive of as the modern “novel” is only a few hundred years old, metered verse has been humanity’s primary mode of storytelling for most of recorded history. The demand of oral cultures for a medium by which information could be easily retained and passed on led in part to this dependence on verse. Think of it this way; if pressed, you could probably recite all the lyrics to a favorite song from memory. Yet you might have more difficulty reciting a prose text of roughly equivalent length, even if you knew the piece well. That’s because the human brain naturally gravitates towards pattern and repetition, and when those qualities show up in language, it gives the text a much higher degree of recallability for most people.
Continued Relevance
However, in an increasingly digital culture where information can be processed and immortalized in record time, a discerning literary student might question whether, divorced from its original purpose, poetry still holds intrinsic societal value. The educated reader has to concede the near-universality of prose in both storytelling and general communication, yet to neglect poetry in favor of its functional successor is to ignore the stylistic underpinnings of prose itself.
It’s easy to see the way devices like rhythm and tempo play into traditional verse. Blank verse for instance, or the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables common to renowned works such as The Odyssey and much of the Shakespearean repertoire, remains so impactful because it mimics the rhythm of the human heart and our natural patterns of speech. Yet, because poetry is so foundational to modern literary expression, this sense of subliminal musicality and flow is equally central to skillful prose. Though some cosmetic debate exists as to what constitutes “good writing,” human beings generally have enough of an intrinsic sense of beauty to recognize it when we see it. Likewise, we can easily hear when a piece feels stilted, unnatural, or otherwise “off.” What many writers fail to realize is that this sense of rightness versus wrongness is strongly aligned with how a piece integrates rhythm, lyricism, tempo, and figurative language. In other words, how the prose incorporates elements of poetry.
Making Music
How then, should the disinterested prose writer bridge this poetic divide? How should one go about incorporating elements of lyricism into text that seems divorced from the lyric form? A good place to start is to read one’s work aloud, looking for places where the natural flow of speech is interrupted by the structure of the language. In this way, the writer can begin to notice the text’s natural pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, and the ways in which internal rhythm may already be present in their prose. The ambitious writer might start exploring poetry itself, and see how the variation in line length, as well as more advanced attributes like figurative language, consonance, and assonance, can be incorporated into their own writing.
Regardless of one’s literary preferences, growing as a writer and an artist necessitates a strong foundation in the origins of one’s field. Looking backward allows one to both learn from the long history of craft that has come before them and honor the path ahead. Though poetry may not be for everyone, learning from it allows both students and professionals alike to unlock the literary tools that have carved out the stories of ages past, and to create hidden musicality of their own.
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