The History of Novels in Verse

Join Me over at Cynsations for a piece I wrote about the HISTORY OF VERSE NOVELS.

Here's a sneak peak:

With authors like Ellen Hopkins, Sonya Sones, and Lisa Schroeder, there has been a virtual explosion of verse novels in the past decade, but do we really understand their place in literature?

Are verse novels a YA or middle-grade fad, a new art form, or something else? Are they even really poetry? Were there verse novels before Out of the Dust won the Newbery in 1998?

In truth, verse novels have quite a long history.
Looking back just a few years, we find that before Out of the Dust there was Soda Jerk by Cynthia Rylant in 1990 and Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff in 1993.

And if we go back just a litter further in time we find Homer (not Simpson), who lived around 850 B.C.E. – the presumed creator of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," two Greek epic poems. Two of the oldest surviving works of Western literature happen to be written in verse. ...

For the rest of the post head over to Cynsations