-
Free Verse
Unlike
couplets
or
sonnets
or
blank
verse,
free
verse
follows
no
pre-
ordained,
regular
pattern
of
rhyme
or
meter.
Therefore,
one
must
identify
free
verse
first
by
looking
for
negative
facts,
by
checking
for
rhyme
and
finding
no
pattern,
checking
for
meter
and
discovering
no
regularity.
We
can,
however,
describe
free
verse
as
more
than
a
set
of
absences.
This
and
the
following
pages
will
attempt
such
a
description
of
the
nature,
history, and technique of this most
modern of verse forms.
Tennis without a Net
Robert Frost famously opined that
writing free verse is like playing tennis without
a net.
Like many other admirers and
practitioners of formal poetry, Frost saw in free
verse an
excessive glorification of
freedom over structure. The effectiveness of
Frost's and similar
criticisms is
evident in the tendency of free verse's admirers
to explain at length why the
idea of
free verse does not authorize a writer to spew out
prose, chop it into lines a few
inches
wide,
and
call
it
free
verse.
Critical
treatments
of
free
verse
routinely
include
a
passage
lamenting
the
apparent
tendency
of
free
verse
to
inspire
bad
poetry;
such
passages
echo
a
centuries-old
tradition
of
critical
laments
about
popular
poetry
and
music, so I do not feel
confident reserving free verse the place of bad
poetry's singular
muse.
The
dominance
of
free
verse
in
contemporary
poetry
does,
however,
create
the
possibility
that
writers
will
employ
free
verse
reflexively,
without
considering
the
possibilities that more formal poetry
might create. Carl Sandburg wrote in 1942,
college student spoke his anxiety about
whether to write his poetry in rhyme or not. The
best I could do for him was the advice:
'If it jells into free verse, all right. If it
jells into
rhyme, all
right.'
may have been directed, also
offered an eloquent response to Frost in the
same article
:
Recently a poet
was quoted as saying he would as soon play tennis
without a net
as to write free verse.
This is almost as though a zebra should say to a
leopard,
would
rather have stripes than
spots,
zebra,
play tennis by
serving and returning the ball over an invisible
net may see himself
as
highly
disciplined.
There
have
been
poets
who
could
and
did
play
more
than
one
game of tennis with unseen rackets, volleying airy
and fantastic balls over an
insubstantial net, on a frail moonlit
fabric of a court.
History
In
the
above-mentioned
article,
Sandburg
argues
that
free
verse
is
as
old
as
rhythmic
speech:
primitive
and
prehistoric
man
first
spoke
with
cadence
or
color,
he
writes,
either
musical
meaning
or
melodic
nonsense
worth
keeping
and
repeating for its definite and
intrinsic values, then free verse was born, ages
before the
sonnet,
the
ballad,
the
verse
forms
wherein
the
writer
or
singer
must
be
acutely
conscious,
even
exquisitely
aware,
of
how
many
syllables
are
to
be
arithmetically
numbered
per
line.
Whether
or
not
one
accepts
this
point,
its
presence
in
Sandburg's
argument
hints
at
the
notion
to
which
Sandburg
responds:
the
idea
that
free
verse
is
fundamentally and perhaps dangerously
modern.
Critics have argued
for lineages of free verse in English that reach
back to the King James
Bible
(especially the Psalms and the Song of Solomon),
William Blake's prophetic poems,
and
other sources. Writing free verse became an
important and widespread movement in
poetry, however, only in the latter
half of the nineteenth century, when French
writers
experimented
with
vers
libre
and
when
the
American
Walt
Whitman
published
many
incarnations of his
influential volume
Leaves of
Grass
. In the twentieth century, free
verse
became the dominant mode of poets
writing in English, to the extent that poets now
can
stand out by writing in regular
forms.
Tools of
Free Verse
Though we cannot
describe free verse in terms of set meter or rhyme
patterns, we can
formulate some
techniques that poets use to create meaning in
free verse.
?
Line length
. Since free
verse has no rules governing line length, poets
can vary it
to create effects
impossible in formal verse. Short, heavily
enjambed lines create
breaks
in
the
flow
of
verse
that
can
slow
the
reader's
pace
and
add
weight
to
every
line.
Long
lines
can
produce
the
effect
of
barely-controlled
energy
that
seems
to
burst
through
the
limits
of
traditional
line
lengths.
In
the
following
passage
from
from
Paumanok,
Whitman
increases the
length
of each
line
to
build
momentum,
even
as
the
starting
the
first
four
lines
helps
the
reader
hear the line breaks.
O such themes! Equalities!
O
amazement of things! O divine average!
O warblings
under the sun usher'd,
as now, or at
noon, or setting!
O strain, musical, flowing
through ages
now reach-ing hither,
I
take to your reckless and composite
chords I add to them, and
cheerfully pass them forward.
(Note:
All
Whitman
texts
here
are
taken
from
the
magnificent
Whitman
Archive
.)
?
Organized
irregularity
. Whitman's habit of
repeating the openings of lines (called
anaphora
) to structure his
verse is one example of the many ways poets can
use
repetition,
rhyme,
parallelism
and
contrast
to
give
the
reader
a
sense
of