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The Birth of Free Verse The scholars cannot agree on when free verse began, or who might serve as the father/mother of free verse. Walt Whitman is often called the first free verse poet to write in English, but, as you might imagine, that is not true. Free verse in English has a long history. It is likely that the influence that inspired Whitman to write free verse came from the King James Bible. Not merely the Psalms, but also the Books of the Prophets and the poetic prose found through out the scriptural text.
There are examples of free verse predating Whitman, going back as far as Abraham Cowley (circa 1665) and including many other poets who lived and died long before Leaves of Grass.
Regardless of its origins, there is little doubt that free verse became firmly established as the dominate form of poetry during the 20th century. If the 20th century is to be delineated in terms of its characteristic poetry, it would be known as the Age of Free Verse. Knowing this does not satisfy us, and should not block or quest to understand the roots of free verse. Nor should it lead one to believe that free verse in former times was marginal and not influential until discovered by modern poets and scholars.
John Milton, for example, wrote some free verse. Was this merely a fit of experimentation that had negligible impact on the rest of his work or the others around and after him? If so, then no linkage might be discerned between free verse before and during the 20th century.
We should also note that meter did not congeal spontaneously in Modern English. Surely, Anglo-Saxon poetry did have its strongly stressed meter, and relied heavily on accents, alliteration, and caesuras, but the transition to syllabic-accentual meter by the 17th century did not happen instantaneously. Instead, there was a period of several decades as the new poetry – new for poets composing, to oversimplify in the extreme, between the times of Chaucer and Shakespeare – took hold.
During this period, accentual syllabic meter found its voice mainly through the influence of non-English poetry. The attempt to adapt classical meters to English took strong stress meter, which relies on the number of stresses per line and alliteration, and turned it into the accentual-syllabic meter, which founds itself on the relation between stressed and unstressed syllables in the line. Though Chaucer broke with this prior tradition in introducing the new meter, it took decades for it to finally sink in. This led to a proliferation of accentual-syllabic meters, given the variety of combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables possible and their combinations in lines. At the time, this was highly unusual, given English’s penchant for stress over all else. Now, of course, we experience such meter as normal if not expected in poetry and some of us might even be bored with it. Hence free verse in all its varieties.
Varieties
Free verse can be categorized into six different varieties. Of course, given humankind’s penchant for organizing and categorizing, free verse might also be divided into the Ten Commandments of Free Verse, or the Twelve Traits of Free Verse, or The Twenty Five Principals, or the Ninety-five Thesis of Free Verse. I picked five just because that’s how many I thought of during this one sitting before the keyboard.
1. phrase-reinforcing
2. word-breaking
3. word-jamming,
4. concrete poems,
5. the prose poem
6. the Animated Poem
1. Phrase-reinforcing works by using “lines parallel to natural phrasal units." Phrase-breaking free verse interrupts the natural phrase “at an unexpected point." Needless to say, formal verse can and has used such techniques especially to highlight meter.
A good example of Phrase-reinforcing is the Hebrew poetry found in the Book of Psalms:
Happy are they who fear the Lord,
and have great delight in his commandments!
Their descendants will be mighty in the lands
the generation of the upright will be blessed.
2. The word-breaking kind of free verse splits a single word between lines. Perhaps the ultimate example comes from this odd poem by e e cummings:
1 (a le af fa ll s) one l iness
This is a blending of the words loneliness and a leaf falls Another example from e e cummings is: two nuns wandering in sin gu lar
adding a layer of meaning to the word singular
3. Word-jamming kind squeezes words together.
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
Note the Eddie and Bill and then balloon man
and Betty and Isabel
"in just" was originally published in The Dial Volume LXVIII, Number 5 (May 1920). New York: The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.
4. Concrete poems are poems where the words are arranged on the page in such a way as to create a picture.
I found some great ones, but this program won't retain the forced spacing needed to turn the words into a picture.
5. Prose poem, are a fade that will not die, and so it must be accepted. If free verse is verse free from the rules then anything anyone calls a poem becomes a poem. I personally don’t like the concept of a prose poem. By definition a prose poem is a piece of writing that falls into sentences rather than lines, that lacks regular meter or rhyme, that is printed like all other prose, and that... a poet has chosen to designate as poetry."
Consider the following prose poem: The Port A Port is a delightful place of rest for a soul weary of life's battles. The vastness of the sky, the mobile architecture of the clouds, the changing coloration of the sea, the twinkling of the lights, are a prism marvellously fit to amuse the eyes without ever tiring them. The slender shapes of the ships with their complicated rigging, to which the surge lends harmonious oscillations, serve to sustain within the soul the taste for rhythm and beauty. Also, and above all, for the man who of mysterious and aristocratic pleasure in contemplating, while lying on the belvedere or resting his elbows on the jetty-head, all these movements of men who are leaving and men who are returning, of those who still have the strength to will, the desire to travel or to enrich themselves.
--Charles Baudelaire
6. THE ANIMATED POEM: Perhaps the newest and freest form of poetry is called Animated Poetry. This new art form grew out of recent developments in technology have unleashed simmering creative impulses in all directions. The ability to combine moving image with sculptured text, and to disseminate the results widely and inexpensively, has produced the following interesting manifestations. Most are smallish downloads. Some can be viewed by clicking on the web addresses below. Others may require you to copy and past the address in your search engine address box. View and have fun.
Disclaimer: All information on this site is provided for informational purposes only! By no means is any
information presented herein intended to substitute for the advice provided to you by any health care or other professional
or organization.
