THE LATER HISTORY
OF POETRY

A Frenchman Invents "Prose Poems"

Ancient Greece had its rhapsodes, singers who have come down in legend as spontaneous and wild. Rhapsodes may indeed have sung rather "freely," i.e., often violating regular form.

Ancient Israel, too, had powerful poets. We can presume that, like the young David, they were bards, singing and playing instruments to their own compositions. The Ancient Hebrew bards composed their psalms (a word meaning "songs") in verbal phrases (cadences) of roughly the same length. One cadence often balanced another, repeating the same thought in different words; that is, repeating one image in a similar one. An example I have made up: "Jerusalem is a harlot, she is a scarlet temptress abandoned by the Lord." (One of the balanced cadences contrasts with the other.) But, however "freely" these Greek and Hebrew poets composed, they composed in verses: you could hear some kind of regularity.

But in the 19th century the French poet Aloysius Bernard seems to have been the first to challenge the total domination of poetry by verse. He composed a book called Gaspard de la Nuit in which every composition was a short emotional prose paragraph: these he called poèmes en prose. They were the first so-called "prose poems:" each one's having some of the emotional effect of a brief, atmospheric lyric poem. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), much inspired by these (and also by his intense admiration for the similarly emotional, sometimes overwrought short stories of American author Edgar Allen Poe) wrote his own imitation "prose poems." Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), greatly admiring Baudelaire, in turn made his own prose poems in imitation of his predecessor.

Previous Poets had Experimented With Verse Handled "Freely"

Beginning with the Greeks there had long been a form, the ode, which could be handled in an ordered or a "free" fashion. But the Greeks respected order and limitation; they were not as Dionysian as Nietzsche believed. Usually they composed in a fairly ordered manner (occasionally deviating from their meters, of course, for effect).

Whitman Writes "Cadenced Verse"

So it was the American poet Walt Whitman (1818-1893) who next advanced things in the direction of 20th century "free verse." In some of his poems in Leaves of Grass Whitman used what has since been called "cadenced verse."

"Cadenced verse" was long verse-paragraphs composed of very long lines, the whole having a chanting, cumulative effect, as if of a poetic catalogue; indeed, the whole is reminiscent of (and owes a great deal to) the King James Version of the Bible and the catalogue of the ships in Book II of Homer's Iliad. Whitman believed that the age of regular meter was over. And certainly no one can deny that Whitman's verse is often effective for his end: the bardic celebration of America.

Ezra Pound Tried to Overthrow Metered Verse

Just after the turn of the 20th century the American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), tired of the lingering presence of what seemed to him very weak, attenuated, and effete metrical verse, attempted to hammer the final nail in its coffin.

To his poetic friends he urged the overthrow of iambic pentameter (and, by implication, of all metered verse). He advocated something he called "the poetry of the musical phrase" (and later, imagism and vorticism.) Pound wished poetry to escape from what he felt was a rising tide of sloppy, flabby, sing-song verse, inaccurately and unobservantly phrased. (The overthrow of metre was merely part of his plan.) Upon his urging, some of his friends, notably the American poetaster Amy Lowell (1874-1925), complied. Pound was unhappy with the results. He complained memorably a few years later that his efforts had resulted in a great deal of crummy verse.

The movement (drift?) toward free verse reached a kind of ultimate point in the post-World War I Dada movement in Switzerland, France, and Germany, when "poets" like the German Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) "wrote" completely without form, sometimes by picking words, written on scraps of paper, out of hats.

The Beginning of a Countertrend

No Verse is Free

To Pound's friend the American poet T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), "no verse is free to a poet who knows his business." Eliot handled many meters, following such practices as he felt comfortable with, and making several innovations. Over their careers, both Pound and Eliot composed a good deal of metered verse (often, as poets do, in rather obscure and forgotten meters) as well as a good deal of less obviously metered ("free"? "cadenced"?) verse.

In the 1950s the American Beat poets continued to write very freely (meters often seem absent in their work), partly because they wished to express their radical freedom, and partly because they were in the tradition of Whitman and the 19th century French poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud.

Where We Are Today

I , for one, am fairly uncertain what "free" verse positively is. I think the term means, simply, verse which treats rather "freely" and loosely such rules as it claims to respect.

The justification for this is effectiveness. If breaking the rules of a meter, or ignoring them, makes a poem better, then that is that. It's all about making fine poems.

But the problem with this is slackness. It is one thing to write in cadences and to repeat and vary them. Cadenced verse I think we can understand and respect. Most of us can enjoy at least some poetry that is built up out of repeated phrases and images of a certain length, especially when these phrases are developed using antithesis and the occasional short contrasting phrase. (The same devices were, of course, often used within metered verse.) Most of us enjoy the cadenced poetry of the King James Bible, at least some of the work of Whitman, and some of the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, Stephen Crane, and Hart Crane. The (seemingly) shapeless "free verse" of quite a few of the 20th century's poets is enjoyable and interesting. (I could list a number of deserving "free verse" masters poets should read.)

But in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s I experimented with "free" verse. I experimented with many poets' ideas and technique. After a decade of experiments and study I came to believe that traditional verse technique, such as in the work of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Homer, Virgil, Marlowe, Jonson, Milton, Marvell, Gray, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Hugo, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Dickinson, Yeats, Frost, Pound, Rilke, Owen, Eliot, Stevens, and Auden (to name a couple), is less gimmicky than "free" (or typographical; another problem) verse. I came to believe that traditional (for lack of a better word) verse technique produces stronger, tighter, and more memorable poems than free verse. I came to believe that the poems that will, in most cases, much longer endure in the hearts of readers than nearly all of the best so-called cadenced or "free" verse, will be traditionally metered poems. (That is, metered with variations on the meter.)

I came to believe that the problem with free verse is not that no one can make it work, but that few can make it work well. (But I make an exception of that damn Stephen Crane, and a few others; I don't know why some of their things work, but work they sometimes do.)

So I found myself, about mid-1993, realizing that I had to change my technique, discard or downplay much that the 20th century had experimented with. I had to turn to, and re-emphasize traditional formal verse.

Traditional formal verse technique, IMHO, with traditional capitalization and punctuation, offers poets greater control than "free (i.e., unpunctuated, uncapitalized, unmetrical) verse". It offers nuance. (Michelangelo is said to have stated, "Art is a matter of nuances, and nuances are no small matter".)

"Free verse"-like deviations from one's rhythm, meter, punctuation, and capitalization are something the good poet should fall back on only when he/she has no alternative for the most compact and powerful expression. Then, such variations are valuable.

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When you are writing what you must write, you will not ask advice of any other person whether it is good.

Paraphrase, of a thought of Rilke in Letters To A Young Poet

For Further Reading

Fairfax, John and Moat, John. The Way to Write. London: Elm Tree Books, 1981. Revised edition, Penguin Books, 1998.

Fraser, G.S. Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse. London: Methuen & Co., 1970.

Fussell, Paul[, Jr]. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. New York: Random House, 1965. Revised edition, 1977.

This book is a clear guide to traditional meters and poetic forms, and has interesting examples and reflections. The revised edition is much improved, with a incisive and fascinating section on free verse.

Hobsbaum, Philip. Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form. London: Routledge, 1996.

Pound, Ezra. The ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1939.

Erratic, entertaining, and stimulating, this short book will give you thirty ideas.

Sutton, Walter. American Free Verse: the Modern Revolution in Poetry. New York: New Directions, 1973.

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Last slightly modified:   12:19 PM 21/01/2004