The English novel Author:Sidney Lanier Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: inal rhythmic cluster, "into the Strand." So of the other introduced words, " encountered " and " hanging " : each has its own rhythm — for an English tongue alw... more »ays gives these words with definite time-relations between the syllables, that is, in rhythm. Therefore, in order to make prose out of this verse, we have not destroyed the rhythms: we have added to them. We have not made it formless: we have made it contain more forms. Now in this analysis, which I have tried to bring to its very simplest terms, I have presented what seems to me the true genesis of prose, and have set up a distinction which, though it may appear abstract and insignificant at present, we shall presently see lies at the bottom of some most remarkable and pernicious fallacies concerning literature. That distinction is: that the relation of prose to verse is not the relation of the formless to the formal: it is the relation of more forms to fewer forms. It is this relation which makes prose a freer form than verse. When we are writing in verse, if we have started the line with an iambus (say) then our next words or syllables must make an iambus, and we are confined to that form; but if in prose, our next word need not be an iambus because the first was, but may be any one of several possible rhythmic forms : thus, while in verse we must use one form, in prose we may use many forms: and just to the extent of these possible forms is prose freer than verse. We shall find occasion presently to remember that prose is freer than verse, not because prose is formless while verse is formal, but because any given sequence of prose has more forms in it than a sequence of verse. Here — reserving to a later place the special application of all this to the novel—I have brought my firstgeneral point to a stage wher...« less