verse

…called poetry at all but verse. Many novels—certainly all the world’s great novels—are literature, but there are thousands that are not so considered. Most great dramas are considered literature (although the Chinese, possessors of one of the world’s greatest dramatic traditions, consider their plays, with few exceptions, to possess no…

…there is the technical term verse to go with the term poetry, while there is no equivalent technical term to distinguish the mechanical part of prose and make the relation symmetrical. The French poet Paul Valéry said that prose was walking, poetry dancing. Indeed, the original two terms, prosus and…

…Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue accompanied by music and…