Why? I am sure that the difference lies not in the two men: nor is it all
the secret, or even half the secret, that Burke is mixing up the spoken
with the written word, using the one while pretending to use the other.
That has carried us some way; but now let us take an important step
farther. The root of the matter lies in certain essential differences
between verse and prose. We will keep, if you please, to our rough
practical definitions. Literature--the written word--is a permanent
record of memorable speech; a record, at any rate, intended to be
permanent. We set a thing down in ink--we print it in a book--because we
feel it to be memorable, to be worth preserving. But to set this
memorable speech down we must choose one of two forms, verse or prose;
and I define verse to be a record in metre and rhythm, prose to be a
record which, dispensing with metre (abhorring it indeed), uses rhythm
laxly, preferring it to be various and unconstrained, so always that it
convey a certain pleasure to the ear.

You observe that I avoid the term Poetry, over which the critics have
waged, and still are waging, a war that promises to be endless. Is Walt
Whitman a poet? Is the Song of Songs (which is not Solomon's)--is the
Book of Job--are the Psalms--all of these as rendered in our Authorised
Version of Holy Writ--are all of these poetry? Well 'yes,' if you want my
opinion; and again 'yes,' I am sure. But truly on this field, though
scores of great men have fought across it--Sidney, Shelley, Coleridge,
Scaliger (I pour the names on you at random), Johnson, Wordsworth, the
two Schlegels, Aristotle with Twining his translator, Corneille, Goethe,
Warton, Whately, Hazlitt, Emerson, Hegel, Gummere--but our axles grow
hot. Let us put on the brake: for in practice the dispute comes to very
little: since literature is an art and treats scientific definitions as
J. K. Stephen recommended. From them