I've had a lot of arguments with this verse/prose thing with Lew over the years (40 at last count, but, please, don't ask him to answer here! You know how he gets.). He is right, I think, in that they are two different modes of writing, but he falls short in thinking about subjective measurements. For example, we could measure a length of rope by all kinds of objective standards--inches, feet, centimeters, cubits. But we could also measure it by subjective standards: "It ain't quite long enough fer what I need it fer." Similarly, we could measure a line of verse by whatever units of measurement we choose: syllables, feet, strong-stresses, number of words, number of e's, etc., and that would be objective measurement. You can base a meter on any unit you please (though some make more sense than others--syllabics, in English, don't really exist for the ear). But to say that a line of verse is long (or short) enough because "I think that's long (or short) enough" seems to fall outside of Lew's Aristotelian ken.
Verse, to me, means lineation. Prose means no lineation. Verse can be written metrically and grammatically and rhetorically and even visually, but, in my opinion, it can also be written according to the "inner directives" of the writer. Thus, "free verse" is not an oxymoron, nor is it prose. It consists of lines that are broken subjectively, sometimes (but not always) by grammatical phrase or by visual arrangement or at some whim of the writer's. Lew seems to be saying that "free verse" could be printed as prose with no loss of spirit or intent. I disagree. It should be obvious that I think that the idea that what began as blank verse might be printed as prose (with no loss) is ridiculous.
Frost's "After Apple-Picking," one of his most engaging poems for me, is written in irregular iambic meter, meaning that the unit (the iambic foot) is retained throughout but that there are "irregular" numbers of feet per line, ranging from one to six. Frost knew enough of his Palgrave to have understood the long and honorable English tradition of the irregular ("false-Pindaric") ode which Cowley, Milton, and Wordsworth used. A recent exemplar of this form has been Catherine Tufariello in poems like "Free Time."
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