I am not sure Robert Frost really understood free verse when he said free verse was like playing tennis without a net. Free verse is a label, and like all labels it misleads as much as it informs. I am not ready to lead some sort of geeky campaign for a different label, but I am ready to explore the term.
Again, most of what I write is aimed first at me. I want you to know, but I want myself to know even more. What is Free Verse? What do we mean when we say Free Verse?
What I think most of us think when we hear the term Free Verse is that it is an ANYTHING GOES way of writing verse. Free Verse is verse without restrictions. This sort of verse is liberated, and rule-less, and therefore easy to write. I mean if you have no restricts, no parameters, then if you can write a sentence you ought to be able to write a poem right?
ome tended to think that this lack of rules meant that they could write any crap they wanted to write, break the sentences up into lines, and they were, by golly, a poet. This is, I believe, a misunderstanding of the form.
Probably our first exposure to poetry is nursery rhymes, and children's books. Nursery rhymes, especially the traditional stuff like Stephenson's Child's Garden of Verses, and Mother Goose, were verses that have a sing-song meter and hard rhymes. Consider the opening stanza of Old Mother Hubbard (a Mother Goose rhyme.)
Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her poor dog a bone;
But when she came there
The cupboard was bare,
And so the poor dog had none.
In the early days of school, it is likely that at least in the 1950s and early 1960s most of the poetry kids were given to read in class were also rhyming poems following a fixed form. Like Longfellow's Midnight Ride of Paul Revere:
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. . .
The thinking was, I suppose, that children needed easily understood story poems and that the cadence and rhyme would make it easier for them to memorize, which was, for a time, considered important for children to do.
Like most learners, my early exposure to Free Verse was met with some reticence, because wasn't like poetry as I had known it up to the time I encountered this anything goes stuff.
What I didn't realize, and what many fail to understand, is that free verse is only free of forcing the words and thoughts into a traditional form, it is not free of poetic techniques. The Free Verse poet can use any poetic techniques he or she choose, and is not confined by a set of rules dictated by a fixed form.
A Free Verse form may not be free of rhyme, but it may not use end rhyme. The Free Verse form may not be absent of cadence, or meter, but that cadence may be flexible, it may flow, change at the will of the poet or the dictates of the context of the poem itself.
When did it start? Who first developed Free Verse? I have the answer to this one: NO ONE KNOWS.
Some would point to Walt Whitman as the first Free Verse poet, and I would agree with those people if they were correct. The problem with this belief is that it is not at all correct. Whitman was influenced by the Biblical poetry as he read it in the King James Version.
While there may be a First poet who wrote Free Verse, there are writers we can look at whose work illustrates an evolution toward Free Verse. For example, scan the following poem by Emily Dickinson and you'll see some odd rhymes:
Because I could not stop for Death 712
Because I could not stop for Death-
He kindly stopped for me-
The Carriage held but just Ourselves-
And Immortality.
We slowly drove-He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility-
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess-in the Ring-
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain-
We passed the Setting Sun-
Or rather-He passed Us-
The Dews drew quivering and chill-
For only Gossamer, my Gown-
My Tippet-only Tulle-
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground-
The Roof was scarcely visible-
The Cornice-in the Ground-
Since then-'tis Centuries-and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity-
Ms Dickinson has rhymed:
away with Civility
Ring with Sun
Day with Eternity
These words don't rhyme. Looking at the words DAY and ETERNITY you may note that both end with a Y, but Day ends with the ā sound and Eternity end with the ē sound.
Here are some variations from traditional hard rhyme:
lant Rhyme: rhyme in which either the vowels or the consonants of stressed syllables are identical, as in eyes, light; years, yours.
Half Rhyme (or Off Rhyme): A partial or imperfect rhyme, often using assonance or consonance only, as in dry and died or grown and moon. Also called half rhyme, near rhyme, oblique rhyme, slant rhyme.
Near Rhyme: A partial or imperfect rhyme, often using assonance or consonance only, as in dry and died or grown and moon. Also called half rhyme, near rhyme, oblique rhyme, slant rhyme.
There is also the use of Internal Rhyme is rhyming within a line. Consider this line by Dylan Thomas:
"the grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother"
Have you ever had someone look at an abstract painting or a Picasso and say something like "a child could have done that," or "that looks like something done by a monkey." A similar attitude may be held toward free verse.
But free verse is not careless, slapped down, prose in short lines. James Dickey wrote free verse poems and said he was always dissatisfied with the first 100 revisions. If it was easy, why would he have 100 revisions?
Poetry is not limited to free verse. People are still writing sonnets, and villanelles, and humorous poems seem to work best with rhyme. The good thing for us is that everything is available. We have a huge toolbox of methods for expressing ourselves in poetry. Learn all you can, and write, write, write.
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