Gildersleeve on verse and prose

Basil Gildersleeve, the great and irritable classicist who became Johns Hopkins University’s first professor of Greek, said at the very beginning of his career—in 1854, when he was only twenty-three—that academic verse-making “stands, in a pedagogical point of view, far behind the exercise of writing prose, not so much on account of the disproportion in numbers between those who possess the faculty divine and those who do not, as because vapidity and inanity cannot conceal themselves so well on the plain ground of the pedestris oratio [pedestrian speech] as in the flight of an anser inter olores [goose among swans], nor loose syntax and careless construction shelter themselves behind the convenient plea of poetic license.”

This is no longer the case. For one thing, no one makes verses in English departments any longer. For another, creative writing has now made it possible for any kind of writing, both prose and the broken lines called “free verse,” both fiction and “creative non-fiction,” to conceal a writer’s inanity.