Novels Plus

In his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth famously defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. His words lurched English poetry to the subjective. By 1850, when both Wordsworth’s Prelude and Dickens’s David Copperfield were published, the novel had replaced poetry as the dominant form in the generic hierarchy. Poets now found themselves fighting back, and writing back, on two fronts: against subjectivism, and against the novel.

Browning sidestepped subjectivism by adapting his voice to dramatic personae; in turning to the drama he also fended off the novel, for dramatic monologue as pioneered by Browning is modelled on Shakespearean soliloquy. But here’s the rub. Browning’s most famous monologue, “My Last Duchess” (1842), is driven by a backstory of marriage, money and murder—the very stuff of the Victorian novel. Browning’s magnum opus, The Ring and the Book (1869), a collection of monologues inspired by a seventeenth-century Roman murder case, aspires to the novel, but as Henry James explained in his essay “The Novel in The Ring and the Book” (1912) it didn’t write the novel it contained. Other writers, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in Aurora Leigh (1856), and Arthur Hugh Clough, in Amours de Voyage (1859), got the gloves off and took the novel on, by writing novels in verse.

Wordsworth’s title offsets Lyrical with Ballads, and Wordsworth told ballad stories well (“Hart-Leap Well” is a telling taster). This doesn’t make his poems verse novels, any more than its backstory makes “My Last Duchess” a verse novel. So, when does the “story” component prevalent in even the most confessional poetry nudge the narrative into novel? The book under review, in which over thirty writers (from Australia and New Zealand) of verse novels are interviewed about their work, offers many answers to this question. 

Several writers in this collection mention Barrett Browning and Clough as influences, but more of them cite Homer and Dante. It’s good to see the classics are alive and well, but such classical verse-narratives are epics, not novels. In “Epic and Novel” (1941) Mikhail Bakhtin identifies the treatment of time, and of character, as absolute boundaries in the generic geography of epic and novel. Epic chronology is distant and closed; novelistic time is open and immediate. Instead of the epic hero, the novel boasts its characters’ felt lives; instead of epic nationalism, the novel can brandish the non-purposive realism of particularity. Such representations of time, character and environment are the very stuff of the verse novel, which could not exist without them, and which (pace Wordsworth and Homer) distinguish it from other kinds of narrative verse. But—and all writers interviewed agree on this—poetry is paramount. Alan Wearne: “the verse-novelist must be a poet first”. The cover of Brian Castro’s Blindness and Rage announces a novel, but in the act of reading, the insistent, irregular rhymes never let you forget that there’s a poem on the page. This novel is about prosody.

Finding a necessary balance between verse and novel, an appropriate interplay between poetic and narrative strategies, is a recurrent concern in this book. Rhythm is a constant reference, in two senses: the larger rhythm of the narrative, or the movement of the story, and the rhythm of the line, or the metrical minutiae of poetic structure. In his seminal essay of 2004, “Australian Verse Novels”, Christopher Pollnitz, himself a poet, writes absorbingly about the metrical challenges facing the verse novelist. His perceptions anticipate the choices and decisions of the writers interviewed here. Free verse, or blank verse? Pentameter, tetrameter, trimeter? Couplets, anyone? In Cadaver Dog (2020), Luke Best fashioned a stanza shaped “as a sloping hill or cliff, symbolising the Great Dividing Range where the story is set”. Such concern with and attention to the specificity of technique reminds us that poetry never comes easy, that “powerful feelings” demand attention to compositional detail. The sense of actuality, of immediacy, of reality, that is so crucial to the novel is, in the verse novel, intensified by poetic technique, so that the particulars of actuality come alive with symbolic meaning. The verse novel isn’t just versified fiction; it’s the novel plus.

And then there’s Chaucer. “All aspiring verse novelists should read Chaucer,” says Gregory O’Brien, who’s from New Zealand, a country with an enviable tradition of medieval literary scholarship. Chaucer’s democratic realism preceded, and survived, the bourgeois novel—in 1967 “The Miller’s Tale” turned many faces a Whiter Shade of Pale—but his progeny are elusive. George Crabbe (1754–1832) saw his “simple annals” of the parish poor as Chaucerian, but today Crabbe’s poetry is as unread as the verse-narratives that his friend Walter Scott (1771–1832) put aside for the Waverley novels. That said, “Peter Grimes” (1810) remains a unique story of child abuse and trauma, and may just have found its way into Dorothy Porter’s El Dorado (2007).

There is general agreement that the foundation text of the verse novel is Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1833), although Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate (1986) gets more airplay in this book. The local giants of the genre are Alan Wearne and the late Dorothy Porter, but their practices, judiciously described by Pollnitz, differ from each other as much as they distinguish themselves from the verse novels of Brian Castro, Les Murray and John Tranter. Antecedents or influences don’t provide a template. For many young readers—the verse novel has a strong young-adult following—Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994) has proved a gateway drug to the intoxicating possibilities of poetry. T.S. Eliot wrote of his plays that he wanted the audience to think they could talk in poetry too, and at her best Porter has that very effect. Wearne acknowledges Browning as “the benchmark”, while still wondering just how Browning did it. If Browning were to read The Nightmarkets (1986) or The Lovemakers (2008), I’m sure he’d have reciprocal admiration for Wearne’s comprehensive refashioning of the monologue.

And the dramatic monologue is the mainspring of the verse novel. Porter likens the monologue to method acting, and the dramatic polyvocality of verse novels has been further inflected by musical influences of jazz and opera, and by the cinematic voice-over. Why has this form flourished in Australia? In her fine introduction, Linda Weste claims that this genre is part of “the decolonisation of cultural production”. Although she doesn’t argue the point, the interviews with writers who use historical subjects surely offer materials for such an argument. It should be made.

Weste’s notes and bibliography are useful, and her index excellent. With exceptions: Byron is listed baldly as “Byron”, and while his title may be superfluous, George Gordon has a right to his forenames. Byron’s Don Juan (1819) isn’t noted, an unfortunate omission because it’s identified by some writers (and, incidentally, by Bakhtin) as a generic hybrid. John Jenkins claims Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) as an influence. Need more info? Get Googling. Such quibbles notwithstanding, this book is testament to Antipodean literary culture, rich with inventive power and creative energy.

The Verse Novel: Australia and New Zealand
by Linda Weste
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2022, $44

Simon Petch taught in the English department at the University of Sydney from 1973 until his retirement in 2006. He reviewed Jennifer Gribble’s book Dickens and the Bible in the May 2021 issue