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The first chapter talked about the national versification systems in Europe as they exist in a close inter-relationship. The next chapter focused on the development of one or another verse form in particular languages. The other chapters talked about the cultural influences that defined the development and the struggles observed between the demands of the language and system of versification. Permanent interaction between literary and popular culture is important for the development of a particular verse forms.

This chapter introduces the establishment of syllabo-tonic versification in Russian poetry, which had great importance for the way versification developed in many Eastern European languages. Czech poetry was the first to assimilate the syllabo-tonic verse. Slovak literary verse repeated this evolution but there was a certain time-lag. During the 1840s, the consolidation of the syllabo-tonic system in German started to influence the Serbian and Croatian poetry and this rested on a long prehistory of gradual syllabo-tonicization of folk syllabic verse by literary verse. The writing of literary verse and Bulgarian versification started after several centuries of Turkish oppression. The syllabo-tonic system reached its apogee in European versification in the second-half of the 19th century.

During the end of the 20th century, a crisis in the consolidated system of classic versification began to surface and become obvious at the turn of the 20th century. A quest for a free, organic form naturally linked to content meant freedom from rigid rhythm and traditional rhyme anda complete rejection of the metres and rhymes. The loosening of metre resulted into the tonic system versification forming two variants in the European systems of versification. The German vers libre was the first to become consolidated and its immediate model was classical poetry. Vers libre, syntactic or asyntactic, rhythmically more constrained or free, describes the last stage reached by European versification in its historical evolution.

Romance versification received another degree of organization through the regulated alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, the syllabo-tonic system, which brought about German and English versification. The first step towards incorporating Romance practice was introduced in German poetry. The second step happened when Germany was flooded by the influence of the fashionable courtly poetry of the French and as a result of this, German Minnessänger very soon displayed syllabic equalization and the syllabo-tonic sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables. The transition in English poetry, however, from alliterative tonic verse under the influence of Latin and French to a reworked syllabo-tonic system preceded approximately in the same way as in German. The history of English verse unfolds on the level of rhythm as well as on the metre.

This chapter describes the syllabic structure of Common Indo-European verse, which has been preserved in the Baltic languages, Latvian and Lithuanian, with the latter as perhaps the one with the greatest degree of clarity. This clarity is probably due to the fact that the original syllabic system in Lithuanian folk versification has been preserved in a purer form compared with others. This chapter also discusses how other languages kept the Common Indo-European legacy. The Baltic language, for example, preserved the versification but only its lesser part, i.e., the short line verses and its derivatives. Slavonic folk poetry preserves the verses into a song, which is primarily lyrical and recited, which is primarily epic and spoken.

‘Un coup de Dés’ gives every appearance of having been composed at random, its text strewn across the page like dice along the baize, its words the flotsam from a shipwreck bobbing here and there on the waves of the turning pages. There is, of course, no conventional versification: no terminal rhymes, and no metrical regularity. Nevertheless, in his preface, Mallarmé speaks of the poem's ‘versification’, of a ‘prosodie, demeurant dans une reuvre, qui manque de précédents, à l'état élémentaire’.

What makes Robert Browning’s poetry exhilarating is not optimism, but strenuous vitality. Life is presented as a challenge. Failure is inevitable but unimportant, so long as the fight goes on. The murdered Pompilia, refusing on her deathbed to admit ‘one faint fleck of failure’ in Caponsacchi’s attempt to save her life, expresses almost too literally this never-say-die spirit. Even Andrea del Sarto, the most depressed and defeatist of all Browning’s characters, is last heard planning to paint a vast mural in heaven, and stressing (‘as I choose’) that he is still, in a way, the master of his fate. This sense of irrepressible vitality is conveyed, not just through character, action, or explicit statement, but more immediately by language, versification, and poetic texture. Browning’s very individual style was evidently developed to satisfy the special feeling for ‘fact’ that he shared with Thomas Carlyle, and that drew him towards historical subjects.

The French verse has its roots in Latin versification, although the former has undergone a few changes over the years. This chapter discusses the different features of French verse: French syllables, the French accent, rhyme, and structural properties.

This chapter describes how the Old Germanic versification still puzzles scholars studying its history. They have not yet succeeded in tracing the language’s evolution from hypothetical Indo-European syllabic verse. In the same way that its versification cannot be traced, English and German alliterative verse became extinct as well due to excessive looseness. Interestingly, while looseness of the language can be a cause of extinction, the Scandinavian language perished from excessive strictness. In both cases, it was replaced by new forms which were Romance in origin.

This chapter describes what happened in the phonological changes during the 3rd century AD in Greek and Latin languages, where opposition of long and short syllables was lost. This chapter talks about how Medieval Greek and Latin syllabic verses developed into classical Greek and Latin quantitative metrics. This development had very important consequences for the whole of medieval European versification. Changing from classical feet metrics to the less constrained medieval syllabic rhythms required compensation, called rhyme, to consolidate the unity of verse lines. The Middle Ages often indulged in sonorous rhyming schemes in metrical poetry until Renaissance came and poets returned to more rigorous imitation of classical models.

This chapter focuses on the three main systems of versification in the Romance language, namely Italian, French, and Spanish. All these versification went through almost the same three stages of development. Among the three major Romance literatures, Italian poetry incorporated the Latin versification in the most direct and straightforward way. The history of French syllabics was somewhat more complex because among all the syllabic variations, it was a decasyllable that developed as a long form. The Italian endecasillabo and another variation is the octosyllable which was used as a short form. Spanish versification, however, was prolonged as the first stages of formation of syllabic verse remained for a long time in the pre-syllabic and quasi-syllabic stages.