Somewhere in my vast collection of sf (as we afficionados call it) novels is a anumber of books by Poul Andersen. One is about mining the asteroid belt and has verses of a sort of interplanetary Great historical bum; another (an early work of fantasy rather than sf) is sprinkled with Anglo-Saxon verses in modern English (if you see what I mean) ... Maybe when the new house is straight and we've crammed all our quarts into pint pots I'll dig 'em out; fir now, you'll just have to wait for a fellow sf-fan catter to identify them.
Steve