free verse

Free verse - also known as vers libre - is a term describing various styles of poetry that are written without using a strict rhyme scheme, but still recognizable as poetry by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers will perceive to be part of a coherent whole.^[1]

Types

Philip Hobsbaum identifies three major types of free verse:

1. Free iambic verse, which is an extension of the work of the Jacobean dramatists. Practitioners of this sort of free verse include: T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and W. H. Auden.
2. Cadenced verse in the manner of Walt Whitman.
3. Free verse proper, where the discrepancies and variations of meter are centre stage.

Cadenced verse is today based on rhythmical phrases that are more irregular than those of traditional poetic meter. When it is used, it tends to follow a looser pattern than would be expected in formal verse. Free verse does away with the structuring devices of regular meter and rhyme schemes; other traditional elements of expression, such as diction and syntax may still be prominent.

History

The ideal of the early practitioners of free verse was well described by Ezra Pound, who wrote: "As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome."^[2] D. H. Lawrence wrote that Whitman "pruned away his clichés — perhaps his clichés of rhythm as well as of phrase" and that all one could do with free verse was "get rid of the stereotyped movements and the old hackneyed associations of sound and sense".^[3]

Some poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, must still display some elements of form. Pound's friend T. S. Eliot wrote: "No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job."^[4] Donald Hall goes as far as to say that "the form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau."^[5]

Some poets have considered free verse restrictive in its own way. In 1922 Robert Bridges voiced his reservations in the essay 'Humdrum and Harum-Scarum.' Robert Frost later remarked that writing free verse was like "playing tennis without a net".

Precursors

As the name vers libre suggests, this technique of using more irregular cadences is often said to derive from the practices of 19th century French poets such as Gustave Kahn and Jules Laforgue in his Derniers vers of 1890. However, in English the sort of cadencing that we now recognize as a variety of free verse can be traced back at least as far as the King James Bible. Walt Whitman, who based his verse approach on the Bible, was the major precursor for modern poets writing free verse, though they were reluctant to acknowledge his influence.

Many poets of the Victorian era experimented with form. Christina Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, and T. E. Brown all wrote examples of unpatterned rhymed verse. Matthew Arnold's poem Philomela contains some rhyme but is very free. Poems such as W. E. Henley's 'Discharged' (from his In Hospital sequence), and Robert Louis Stevenson's poems 'The Light-Keeper' and 'The Cruel Mistress' can be counted early examples of free verse.^[6]

In France, a few pieces in Arthur Rimbaud's prose poem collection Illuminations were arranged in manuscript in lines, rather than prose.

In the Netherlands, tachtiger (i.e. member of 1880s generation of innovative poets) Frederik van Eeden employed the form at least once (in his poem Waterlelie ["water lily"]^[7]).

Goethe (particularly in some early poems, such as Prometheus) and Hölderlin used it occasionally, due in part to a misinterpretation of the meter used in Pindar's poetry; in Hölderlin's case, he also continued to write unmetered poems after discovering this error.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Mysterious Music: Rhythm and Free Verse (book)

References

• Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody, Northwestern University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-8101-1316-3
• Philip Hobsbaum, Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form
• H. T. Kirby-Smith, The Origins of Free Verse, University of Michigan, 1996. ISBN 0-472-08565-4.
• Timothy Steele, Missing Measures Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter, University of Arkansas Press, 1990.

Notes