Versification

Versification is the system of organising poetic speech through the rhythmic commensurability of lines, the feature that distinguishes verse from prose. Ukrainian versification evolved from the folk-song and duma tradition through the syllabic verse of the Baroque (Velychkovsky, Skovoroda) to the syllabo-tonic system, whose foundations were laid by Ivan Kotliarevsky's Eneida and which was developed by Taras Shevchenko, and further to the tonic and free forms of the twentieth century (Tychyna, Antonych, Bazhan). The scholarly study of versification — prosody — examines metre, rhythm, rhyme, stanza structure and the intonational-syntactic order. A versification type is defined by which linguistic units are counted to build rhythm: syllables, stresses, or their combination.