Free verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that does not adhere to traditional patterns of rhyme or meter, allowing for greater flexibility and creativity in expression. It is characterized by its rejection of formal constraints, enabling poets to capture the rhythms of natural speech and personal emotion. The roots of free verse can be traced to various historical influences, including medieval alliterative verse and the biblical poetry found in the King James Version. Notable poets associated with the development of free verse include Walt Whitman, who is often referred to as its father, and T. S. Eliot, whose groundbreaking poem "The Waste Land" exemplified its modernist potential.
Throughout the 20th century, free verse gained momentum as poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams championed new stylistic approaches, emphasizing clarity and immediacy. The movement also inspired the Black Mountain poets, who sought to connect poetic form with the rhythms of breath and life. By the late 20th century, free verse had become prevalent, with modern poets debating the relationship between voice and traditional metrics. Today, free verse remains a vibrant and dynamic medium, reflecting diverse voices and experiences across cultures and literary movements.
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Free verse
Free verse is poetry that follows no established pattern of rhyme or meter. Some definitions add that free verse follows organically the rhythms of speech, but this is not necessarily the case. Robert Frost, who preferred rhymed verse and blank verse, famously compared writing free verse to playing tennis without a net. Carl Sandburg, who may have inspired Frost’s testy statement, said: “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.” Free verse, then, is not formalist, is not traditional, and is not dependent on established rules.
Brief History
Medieval alliterative verse is based on an alliterative line organized by stress, usually four stresses per line. Syllable count within the line can vary widely. Some scholars view this alliterative line as the first free verse. The experiments of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) with “sprung rhythm” hark back to alliterative verse, using feet with a variable number of syllables with the stress always on the first syllable. Others suggest that the King James Version of the Bible (1611), particularly Psalms and the Song of Solomon, gave the world the first free verse in English. Christopher Smart (1722–1771), whose Jubilate Agno (1758–1763) is commonly recognized as a kind of free verse, and William Blake (1757–1827), whose “Argument” to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793) has been termed the first free verse, were both influenced by the form and content of biblical verse.
The influence of the biblical line is also evident in the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Whitman, the poet most frequently identified as the father of free verse, proclaimed his break with rhyme and other conventions of poetry shortly after the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). Whitman anticipated the changes that lay ahead for Anglo-American poetry, and his influence proved immeasurable, extended not only to leading American poets of the next century, such as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and Allen Ginsberg, but also to leading poets around the world, including Rubén Darío (Nicaragua), Federico García Lorca (Spain), Guillaume Apollinaire (France), Pablo Neruda (Chile), and Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina).
Ezra Pound (1885–1972), whose injunction to “make it new” became the battle cry of modernism, made a concerted effort to see that a new poetry developed. He helped to found the movement he called imagism around 1912, and although he broke with imagism after Amy Lowell became prominently associated with it, his requirements for imagist poems significantly shaped the new poetry. He wanted poetry that avoided abstraction, poetic diction, and unnecessary words and rejected conventional metrical forms. His own poem “The Seafarer” (1913) was based on a surviving Old English poem and made use of alliteration and irregular lines with strong stresses.
Pound also was instrumental in the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1914) by T. S. Eliot, a poem that has been called the first free verse poem. Pound’s quest for the new led him to models not only in the Anglo-Saxon past but also in Provençal, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese poetry. Eliot was most influenced by nineteenth-century French poets who had similarly struggled with breaking away from traditional prosodic rules. He was particularly influenced by Jules Laforgue (1860–1887), who claimed to have forgotten rhyme, metrics, and stanzas. In 1921, Pound edited Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Radical in technique and unrelentingly conscious of the literary tradition it challenged, The Waste Land became the most studied and most translated modernist poem.
Topic Today
Other poets played varying roles in the free verse revolution. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) published Sea Garden (1916), arguably the purest and most powerful expression of imagism. Wallace Stevens argued that free verse was the only poetry with an “aesthetic impulse” behind it. E. E. Cummings eccentrically revised the rules of grammar and linguistics for his purposes and created a distinctive form of free verse. Perhaps most significant after Pound and Eliot was William Carlos Williams, whose proclamation “no ideas but in things” was almost as important to modernism as Pound’s dictum.
By the middle of the twentieth century, a second generation of modernist poets was making their ideas known. Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) and other poets in the New York School were drawing inspiration from jazz and avant-garde art. In 1950, Charles Olson (1910–1970) published an influential essay, “Projective Verse,” calling for a poetic line based on the rhythm of the poet’s breath and a form determined only by the poem itself, the latter clearly descended from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s idea of “organic form.” Olson taught at Black Mountain College, an educational experiment in Black Mountain, North Carolina. He and those who shared his ideas about projectivist poetry, many of whom taught or studied at the school, were known as the Black Mountain poets. Among the most influential of this group were Robert Creeley (1926–2005), Robert Duncan (1919–1988), and Denise Levertov (1923–1997).
In 1977, free verse had been so widely adopted that poet Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006) insisted that poetry was no longer defined by prosodic practice but by voice inflection. Modern poet Timothy Steele, largely a formalist himself, argued in 2006 that rhythm and meter had become so disconnected that the challenge of the twenty-first-century poet was to reunite them.
Bibliography
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Finch, Annie. The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993. Print.
Hartman, Charles O. Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody. 1996. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014. Print.
Hirsch, Edward. A Poet’s Glossary. New York: Houghton, 2014. Print.
Holmes, Anne. “Laforgue’s Derniers Vers, x: Interior Monologue and ‘Vers Libre.’” The Modern Language Review 108.3 (2013): 802–811. Print.
Kirby-Smith, H. T. The Origins of Free Verse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. Print.
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