Free Verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that does not follow a specific rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. It allows poets to have more freedom in their writing, as they are not constrained by traditional poetic structures. Free verse often focuses on the natural flow of language and can vary in line length and rhythm.
8 Key excerpts on "Free Verse"
eBook - ePub- (Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Emerald Publishing(Publisher)
...To explain what it is, there is a need to start with the idea of form itself. In poetry composition through the centuries, English writers were given a classical education and this meant the study of the Greek and Roman authors. These poets worked according to rules about the rhythm in lines of verse. Later in the chapter, we look at this system of ‘metrics’ but for now, the point is that Free Verse is not constrained by these rules. Rules but no rules Rather than being governed by metrics, as in this stanza : I sit beneath your leaves, old oak; You mighty one of all the trees, Beneath whose hollow trunk, A man could stable his big horse with ease. (W H Davies: The Oak Tree) Free Verse is a way of writing that follows inner modulations of voice rather than a set pulse of beats. Notice how the Davies poem has four syllables in each line, and when you read it aloud, it has a ‘regular’ (repeated) beat. It is in a stanza, a section of a poem, set out usually with regularity. Free Verse follows the pulse of inner talk, or of speech. Effects are often like this: That was the way the world went, Then, When smiles were free And you felt them true. Notice how in these lines, the words are expressed and lineated according to the nature of the statements. So how ‘free’ is Free Verse? It can be seen from this that Free Verse does have an organising principle. There are some guidelines. People who are critical of Free Verse defend formal structures by saying that form ‘stops a poem saying everything’. Yet advocates of Free Verse claim there is just as much discipline and hard work behind their lyrics...
eBook - ePubThe Prosody Handbook
A Guide to Poetic Form
- Robert Beum, Karl Shapiro(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...16 Free Verse Because Free Verse is free to be regular as well as to be free, it is difficult to define. One is forced to define it by generalization and by example, rather than formally. It is poetry that is not regular enough to be called verse but that is free to use, at any given point, any of the techniques or devices of verse—including meter and rhyme. We have already noticed that Whitman employs assonance, alliteration, rhyme, and occasionally meter in his Free Verse poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Good Free Verse is always more concentrated and almost always less direct than prose, and at its leanest it still employs at least one technical device that is a characteristic of poetry and not of prose—the line. One can think of possible difficulties in describing Free Verse: Is a poem that is irregular in every way except that it consistently rhymes abab Free Verse? Is a poem that is without rhyme, stanza, formal devices of sound, and formal patterns of syllable count and line length, but that is written throughout in rapidly changing but distinct feet of various kinds (e.g., iambs, trochees, anapests) Free Verse? But it is more important to see the most typical characteristics of the best Free Verse than to worry about a strictly logical, unassailable definition. A typical Free Verse poem shows no formal prosodic devices and is unrhymed throughout. It is as difficult to scan as prose; at least, no two persons’ scansions will be at all the same. And yet it has form: the arrangement of syllables and words, the line lengths, and the distribution of pauses fit the sense at every point. By now Free Verse is no longer the so-called experimental, controversial, revolutionary development it was thought to be in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The one work that was undoubtedly more important than any other in gaining international prestige for the new form was Whitman’s book of Free Verse poems Leaves of Grass (first edition, 1855)...
eBook - ePub- Philip Hobsbaum(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 Free Verse Free Verse should not be thought of as a kind of verse without form. On the contrary, there are three quite distinct varieties of writing which shelter under this blanket denomination. Each variety has quite enough form to make it distinct from the other, and from any other kind of verse. Not one of those three varieties, however, answers to the following description, circulated by several scholars and put forward authoritatively by Paull F.Baum in his book The Principles of English Versification. Baum says that some kinds of Free Verse ‘do not aim to be more than ordinary prose printed in segments more or less closely corresponding with the phrase rhythm or normal sound rhythms of language’. Such writing as this—and one must agree with Baum that there has been a good deal of it in the twentieth century—is not verse of any sort, free or otherwise. Amateur poets are especially prone to this kind of writing. A recent example, part of a competition which the present author helped to judge, ran thus: I know of a game played by many without definite rules—that is hopelessly [misjunderstood. a game at which I do not wish to win or lose only continue to [un]earth more complex tactics and engaging moves. This appears to be a disquisition on poetry, though it may also be treating poetry as a metaphor for love. What it cannot be called is verse. There is little difference if we write it out as prose: I know of a game played by many without definite rules, that is hopelessly [misjunderstood. A game at which I do not wish to win or lose, only continue to [un]earth more complex tactics and engaging moves. If anything, the piece is improved by being set out as prose, together with some rectifying of the punctuation. In that form, it seems to be a kind of resolution to improve craftsmanship in whatever art the author is contemplating, rather than to be competitive against other people. The sentiment is admirable. The expression, too, has its virtues...
eBook - ePub- G. S. Fraser(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 Free Verse The term Free Verse can be used in very wide ways. The late Herbert Read thought that in their blank verse at its best Wordsworth and Keats were writing what is practically Free Verse; he was not making allowances for the great flexibility, the readiness to accept substitution, of the English five-foot iambic line. A poem like Milton’s Lycidas or Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality, which has no fixed stanza length or rhyme scheme, which allows for ‘hanging’ or unrhymed lines, and the interspersion irregularly of shorter lines among longer ones, is in a sense ‘free’. Some critics would use the term for any poem they admire which does not seem to be written in regular iambics. Yeats, for instance, was a very great, though as we have seen in one sense a very ‘free’ and flexible, master of traditional iambic metrics. But I came recently on an attempt to scan the opening line of one of his greater late poems, Byzantium, thus: The únpúrged ímages of dáy recéde. Yeats was praised by the writer for cramming the first three metrical stresses of the iambic pentameter together, and spacing out the last two. If he had done so, he would have indeed been writing a kind of Free Verse. But if we use our simplified version of the Trager-Smith four-stress system, we see that the line scans perfectly regularly thus: or, in my other equivalent notation, thus: Th ûn/pùrged ím/ågês/ f dáy/ r céde. Even if we want to give a stronger sense stress to ‘un-’ than think rhetorically justified, such a scansion as is still regular and permissible. I think the critic to whom I am alluding was mislead by the possible four-stress pure-stress scansion which can always be felt as underlying the iambic line: The únpurged ímages: of dáy recéde. Much that is taken as Free Verse, or as breaking the old rules, is merely, in fact, an intelligent use of the great flexibility of the old rules...
eBook - ePub- John Timpane, Maureen Watts(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- For Dummies(Publisher)
...What a feast — and how worked it is: You can tell that, for all the spontaneous, incantatory (chant-like) quality of these lines, a poet with a remarkable ear slaved over this passage. So Free Verse isn’t that free and easy after all. To cut through all this misunderstanding surrounding the term Free Verse, maybe not calling it Free Verse would be best. In this book, we refer to it as open-form poetry, a name deriving from the theories of Black Mountain poet Charles Olson, who spoke of “open verse.” The term open-form poetry makes two points that the term Free Verse doesn’t: As soon as you start writing a poem, you’ve chosen a form. You can’t help it. As soon as you start writing open-form poetry, you discover rules you’re imposing on yourself. In this chapter, we put together some guidelines for writing open-form poetry. We discuss why your attitude and approach are principal parts of writing open-form poetry, as well as point out some of the pitfalls awaiting the open-form poet. Even though open-form poetry allows for a great degree of independence and self-expression, poets who choose the open-form have to earn every ounce of freedom by showing the greatest attention to detail in their poems. Understanding Open-Form Poetry The word open in the term open form has a positive meaning (what it is) and a negative meaning (what it’s not) — and we cover both in the following sections. What open-form poetry is Open form allows poets to do nearly anything that can be done with language — the poet has more options with this kind of poetry. Open forms have rhythm, music, and even some rhyme, but the poet keeps those aspects changing and changeable throughout the poem. When writing open-form poetry, you’re trying to be open to how your mind works — your individual set of memories, associations, and subconscious cerebral murmurs...
eBook - ePub- Jeffrey Wainwright(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Free Verse of course does not do away with rhythm. What it does do is bring in the opportunity for very particular, intuitive variation, Blake’s ‘variety in every line’. For all the apparent self-effacement that goes with modernist free-verse, whether by clipping the voice, or by having it speak from within a spinning cloud of scenes, impressions and knowingness, idiosyncrasy is at the heart of it. The essential point of the unmeasured line is that it is particular to its occasion, bespoke not already patterned. Charles Olson (1910–70) in his influential essay ‘PROJECTIVE VERSE’ (1950), insists that when a poet departs from ‘closed form’ ‘he [ sic ] puts himself in the open – he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares for itself.’ In effect Olson is developing the romantic tradition in which Coleridge formulated the idea of ‘organic form’. This means, as Olson’s countryman Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in the nineteenth century, that a poem is not an artefact, but ‘like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own’. These ideas will be considered more fully in Chapter 8, ‘Image – imagination – inspiration’. Olson’s aim is the entire abandonment of what he derided as the ‘honey-head’, ‘the sweetness of meter and rime’, in favour of a line based in the breathing rhythms of the poet. As for Williams, the typewriter becomes important since its precise calibrations enable the composing poet to ‘score’ the poem not only with conventional punctuation but by exact spacings, multiple margins and symbols such as the /. This ‘field composition’ can thus configure a poem across the full dimensions of the page...
eBook - ePub- Richard Bradford(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 Modernism and criticism WHAT IS Free Verse? This will be the most important and exploratory chapter of the book. The above question has taxed the interpretive resources of critics and poets since the first decade of this century and has resulted in a rich variety of solutions. None of these can claim to be a comprehensive, abstract definition of what Free Verse is or of how it works and many remain as angry attempts to dismiss the validity of their competitors. Free Verse is the most significant contribution by poetry to the formal aesthetics of modernism, and in the following pages I shall attempt to provide a thorough account of how it began, why it persists and of its structural and functional identity. In the process we will be forced to reconsider the standard, conventional perceptions of how language works and more significantly of how poetic language can claim to be different from its non-poetic counterparts. TO DEFINE THE INDEFINABLE Consider the following task. Choose a poem and then define the metrical-prosodic form in which it is written. Most people will be able to identify The Rape of the Lock as a sequence of heroic couplets, Paradise Lost as blank verse and Shakespeare’s sonnets as indeed sonnets. At the irregular end of the sliding scale, the Romantic ode, Hopkins’s sprung rhythm or Coleridge’s accentualist experiment in ‘Christabel’ will make concessions to identifiable patterns of syntax, alliteration, rhythm or rhyme scheme—their irregularity is validated by their invocation of regular precedent. But with Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ or Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’ we can agree to designate all three as Free Verse only because they persistently evade the abstract patterns of regular verse. We know what they are because of what they are not...
eBook - ePubThe Soul Is a Stranger in This World
Essays on Poets and Poetry
- Micah Mattix(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cascade Books(Publisher)
...All forms are invented. Chaucer’s heroic couplet, Dante’s terza rima, Petrarch’s sonnet did not fall from the sky. They were created as these poets explored human experience in language, informed by their respective understandings of who we are and what there is. The development of traditional forms and Free Verse in English, as H. T. Kirby Smith has pointed out in The Origins of Free Verse, is much messier than is often acknowledged, by “organicists” and formalists alike. Furthermore, in simply returning to traditional forms—which is what Signorelli seems to have in mind when he calls us to return to “formally structured, consecutively ordered verse”—without exploring current human experience in language, the poet runs the risk of becoming a grammarian, skilled in the technique of poetic forms but lacking in virtuous insight. I, too, believe that contemporary poetry can be reinvigorated by an incorporation of meter and rhyme, but rather than simply rejecting Free Verse as immoral, a better solution would be for poets to open themselves up to the possibility of rhyme and meter, using it when appropriate as they explore language in search of new forms that communicate the truth of who we are and what there is to living individuals. After all, art is a communal act, and the artist must write poems that meet his own satisfaction but also serve his audience....
