Versaic versus Prosaic

We're accustomed to the notion that verse, together with other formal techniques, works to "shape" language, by which we usually mean that it adds to the material of language certain kinds of nuance, ambiguity, character, or tone, among other qualities. But what if we instead take the idea of language's "shape" more seriously, venturing the possibility that different kinds of language map different kinds or topologies of space involving fundamentally different epistemological and phenomenological principles, consequences, and values? In this paper, I argue that verse and prose are two such shapes, that prose is the privileged one between them, and that when we describe verse as "shaping" language in the usual sense, as a kind of additive or qualifier, we are actually assimilating it to the condition of prose—that is, to the prosaic—one in which more is generally better. Instead, I argue that verse constitutes its own fundamental condition of language—what I call "versaic" language—in which language works by thinning itself out rather than filling itself up. By looking in great depth at just a small fragment of a Wordsworth poem, I begin to sketch the particular shape and character of versaic language as a kind that is ultimately assimilated not to the structure of language's contents but to that of its limits, which it thereby makes continuingly available to the reader's apprehension. I also gesture toward the ethical stakes of that work.