OK...So you're tired of all this 'Fixed Form' stuff: You want to be a modern Free Verse poet

You are probably going to be disappointed. In our earlier articles addressed to the fixed forms it was possible to give reasonably clear guidance as to what was expected. As will become clear, this is much less easy with free verse, even though as poets we must believe that there is some underlying structure which distinguishes a free verse poem from prose, and that there are guiding principles available to both the poet and the reader. Furthermore, I believe, as I said in the earliest of the articles in this series, that a truly good poem will speak to a reader the poet will never know; a reader from a different culture; and even a reader from a future in which the poet will have been long dead. I think that this is a standard that even the most radical of modern poets must accept: ephemera have a very limited place in our art.

Here is a fairly lengthy quote from Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature: "Although the term is loosely applied to the poetry of Walt Whitman and even earlier experiments with irregular meters, it was originally a literal translation of Vers Libre, the name of a movement that originated in France in the 1880s. The first English-language poets to be influenced by vers libre, notably T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, were students of French poetry."

Actually, both Pound and Eliot were scholarly poets, deeply versed in the history of poetry, and both with good knowledge of languages other than English, to the point where they were capable not only of translation, but of writing in the foreign language. It is scarcely surprising that their development of a poetic form which escaped the strictures of rhyme and formal metrical schemes should itself follow a foreign model.

In England, the influence of vers libre led to the Imagist movement, started by Aldington, Pound, Flint, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). One of the principles of this movement was "to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome". In addition, the aim was to use concrete language and figures of speech, modern subject matter, freedom in the use of meter, and avoidance of romantic or mystical themes. In 1914, Pound turned to Vorticism, a literary and artistic movement that was founded in 1912 by Wyndham Lewis. Vorticism attempted to relate art to industrialization: it opposed the sentimentality it regarded as characteristic of the 19th century, and extolled the virtue of the machine. It promoted something of a cult of sheer violence. By 1915, the First World War had begun, and Vorticism ended.

Ezra Pound was a key figure in the development of these new forms, and in particular acted as a counselor to other poets engaged in the development; he has been called the 'poet's poet'. T. S. Eliot's dedication of The Waste Land, which was published in 1922, is "For Ezra Pound; il miglior fabbro"; and Pound is credited with identifying H.D. as an Imagist, and offering some editorial guidance on her early poems.

Pound was only three years older than Eliot, but in the reported discussions between the two his seniority is evident, at least in the early years. In 1928, a volume of his Collected Poems was published in London; Pound was then 43, and of course the major steps in the change to free verse forms had already been taken. The Collection has an interesting introduction by Eliot, in which he writes: "I remarked some years ago, in speaking of vers libre, that 'no vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job'. The term, which fifty years ago had an exact meaning, in relation to the French alexandrine, now means too much to mean anything at all. The vers libre of Jules Laforgue, ……is free verse in much the way that the later verse of Shakespeare, Webster, Tourneur, is free verse: that is to say, it stretches, contracts, and distorts the traditional French measure as later Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry stretches, contracts and distorts the blank verse measure. But the term is applied to several types of verse which have developed in English without relation to Laforgue, Corbière, and Rimbaud, or to each other. To be more precise, there are, for instance, my own type of verse, that of Pound, and that of the disciples of Whitman……I did not read Whitman until much later in life, and had to conquer an aversion to his form, as well as to much of his matter, in order to do so. I am equally certain - it is indeed obvious - that Pound owes nothing to Whitman."

In this context, it is worth looking at the following poem by Pound: it is in the collection Lustra, which was published in 1916; it is also in the Selected Poems:

                    A PACT

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman-
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends,
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now it is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root-
Let there be commerce between us.

We have seen in an earlier article that Pound was a profound scholar of Provençal poetry, and I reproduced there his Sestina: Altaforte which is a triumph of a complex fixed form. But now read his Near Perigord which relates also to the same general area and period. It ends:

There shut up in his castle, Tairiran's,
She who had nor ears nor tongue save in her hands,
Gone - ah, gone - untouched, unreachable!
She who could never live save through one person,
And all the rest of her a shifting change,
A broken bundle of mirrors . . . !

Eliot remarks that in the earlier parts of the poem "there is the voice of Browning" but that these [lines] above "are not Browning, or anybody else but Pound". The point of this quotation is to illustrate Eliot's awareness not only of the forms of earlier poetry, but even the specific forms of language used by the great poets: I think that all poets with this kind of view regard Browning as particularly important in this regard. As we start to examine free verse forms, it will be necessary to consider some new principles, and this one, the poet's 'voice' is, in my view, one such. You will need to think of your own 'voice' in the poetry you write.

I have recently been reading a very interesting book, A History of Free Verse by Chris Beyers (The University of Arkansas Press, Fayeteville, AR, 2001), which I think is a useful addition to any poet's (or reader of poetry's!) bookshelf. Here is a quotation from it, and I will introduce others later:

"In 1918 C. E. Andrews, seeking to deal judiciously with what he considered to be the new phenomenon of free verse, remarked,

Unless the modern school develops some principle of length and flow of rhythms, and some sense of grouping, of climax, of form, they will have only the temporary vogue of startling novelty.

As sensible as Andrews's statement may sound, he turned out to be dead wrong. Free verse turned out to be the ascendant form for twentieth-century American poetry, yet there is still no generally recognized principle of form or rhythm."

I looked through the November/December issue of The American Poetry Review which arrived a couple of days ago. There isn't a single fixed form poem in it (of course). So far as I could see, no-one has used any of the standard devices - the occasional rhyming couplet, for example; internal rhymes or alliteration. The line lengths for the first few poets were close to ten syllables, which is intriguing; but I think it would be interesting to look at the comments which follow in this article and for you to examine the poems in APR and look at the ways in which the poets achieve their results. American Poet, which is the Journal of the Academy of American Poets, is also interesting in this regard, particularly because the links to the past are sometimes rather more apparent.

Now, back to Beyers:

"….the inability to define rhythms is often taken to mean that the term designates something supersophisticated and hyperaesthetic. John Cunliffe remarked in 1916 that free verse 'demands greater subtlety of rhythmic perception both on the part of the reader and the part of the hearer.'"

An important issue is what is called 'cadence', and Beyers notes that "The indeterminateness of cadence is a central problem of free verse rhythm…" We will return to cadence later in this article.

It has always been accepted that a deviation from rules is an important part of poetry, and that the great poet uses these deviations to make important points; we have already commented on this in earlier articles in this series, and Alexander Pope makes the point strongly in his Essay on Criticism. However, as several poets and critics have pointed out, if you don't have a set of rules, how can you make a point by deviating from them?

Early 'new verse' poets (I am using this phrase to avoid the more precise term 'free verse') made considerable use of typography and spacing on the page to help the reader to see the rhythm; but others have remarked that it is the reader's task to make the rhythm. By the middle 1930s most poets had abandoned explicit methods of guiding the reader to the rhythm. Beyers says: "Historically, what happened was that free-verse poetry started evincing less concern about guiding the reader because new contracts between free-verse poets and readers familiar with Modern poetry began to emerge."

Of course, I think that is true; but one must ask how this is compatible with my opening paragraph. For older forms of poetry, the poem itself directs a reader without specialist knowledge of anything but the language; one must not expect the reader to have taken a course in "Modern poetry"! Elitism is a danger for us.

One way of classifying free verse is in terms of line length: the most obvious case is long-line poetry. Long-line verse actually has a considerable history, certainly going back to the King James Version of the Bible. Perhaps the best-known of the Psalms, the 23rd, is typical in this regard:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his      name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou     anointeth my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I  will dwell    in the house of the Lord for ever.

Whitman, of course, is well-known for using long lines. This is from Drum-Taps:

Not houses of peace indeed are you, nor any nor all of their prosperity,
      (if need be, you shall again have every one of those houses to 
      destroy them,
You thought not to destroy those valuable houses, standing fast, full of
       comfort, built with money,
May they stand fast, then? not an hour except you above them and all
       stand  fast;)

and more recently Allen Ginsberg is also a good example, here from Howl:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving  
        hysterical  naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an
       angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
       starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
       supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops
         of cities contemplating jazz,

Short-line poetry is exemplified by H.D. and William Carlos Williams, among others. Here is the opening stanza of Cliff Temple, by H. D.:

Great, bright portal,
shelf of rock,
rocks fitted in long ledges,
rocks fitted to dark, to silver granite,
to lighter rock -
clean cut, white against white.

Usually, short-line poetry makes extensive use of enjambment, which in French means 'striding over', and in poetry means the continuation of the sense of a phrase beyond the end of a line of verse. The opening of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot is an example:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

This is a particularly good example, because each line begins with an explicit statement that can be read with the following line, or with the preceding line: the enjambment extends the flow across these to the entire stanza.

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of dead land.

and:

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire.

And so on.

It has sometimes been said that long-line poetry does not use enjambment at all, but (as usual!) this is an oversimplification.

Beyers also identifies a fourth kind of free verse, which " 'avoids tradition' as Graham Hough puts it". Pound talks of how various are the meters available to a poet that "fanatical vers librists will escape them with difficulty".

As I remarked in an earlier article, Shakespeare used iambic pentameters in his 'blank' (that is, unrhymed) verse as spoken by his upper class characters because that was the natural rhythm of educated 'English English' speech as spoken in his time, and to a large extent it still is. It should be remembered that Cockney slang is based on rhyme ('apples and pears' = 'stairs'), and much conversation in England is allusive at all sorts of levels: the comedy of Monty Python's Flying Circus, for example, is often based on word games.

William Carlos Williams was eager to generate an American voice, that is, one using 'American English'. In a note which follows Pictures from Brueghel and other poems, John C. Thirlwall remarks that in 1924 Williams rejected free verse and sought for a controlled measure, which led eventually to the "variable foot" and versos sueltos, 'loose verses' which use triadic stanzas. Thirlwall says: "There was a danger that even with the 'variable foot' the triadic stanza might become monotonous as free verse had become monotonous. It was 'measure' that rescued Williams' verse by rhythmical variations, as the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton was rescued by the rhythmical variations of the iambic pentameter. 'The iamb is not the normal measure of American speech,' he told me in 1953. 'The foot has to be expanded or contracted in terms of actual speech. The key to modern poetry is measure, which must reflect the flux of modern life. You should find a variable measure for the fixed measure; for man and the poet must keep pace with the world.' "

Really, these points above are very similar to what Whitman said: "…smooth walk, trimm'd hedges, poseys and nightingales" may be appropriate for British poets nurtured by a culture rooted in feudalism (!) but an American dedicated to the "true idea of Nature" is satisfied only with a poetic that embraces the entire "kosmos".

However, if we were to follow the lines of thought above, we might expect that American poetry and English poetry would have diverged, particularly over the last fifty years, and particularly in the general field of free verse. After all, Pound and Eliot were polycultural, internationalist, classicist, renaissance men, even. Williams was not: he was embedded by choice in Rutherford, New Jersey, as a medical practitioner; and to a significant extent this has been a pattern for American poets for the last half century. Many poets, of course, have benefited from Fellowships and other academic appointments awarded by Universities on either side of the Atlantic, but often these awards are made to poets who have already found their voices.

In this context, it could be argued that poetry in England has kept what could be called a traditional approach to poetry for a lot longer than the American scenario I have described above, recognizing of course that Eliot spent the larger part of his life in England. Perhaps the key events in the appearance of a sea change in English poetry in England relate to the career of Ted Hughes, and not least to his involvement with Sylvia Plath. I have a small volume entitled Poetry Dimension 1: A Living Record of the Poetry Year which was edited by Jeremy Robson, and published by Abacus in 1973. There is an interesting article by Elizabeth Hardwick on Sylvia Plath, drawn from the New York Review of Books (it is an unfortunate fault in this book that the sources are sometimes given, but not the dates); however, it refers to Ariel, which was published in 1965, two years after her suicide. It is much less sympathetic than most later reviews of her and her work. Ted Hughes married Plath in 1956; they had separated before her suicide, but he stopped writing poetry almost completely for three years after. He edited her poems after her death; and in 1971 Crossing the Water was published.

Poetry Dimension I also has an article by David Lodge about Hughes's Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, which was published in 1971 Another piece on this work by Nicholas Moore, drawn from The Times Literary Supplement, remarks: "…Ted Hughes's Crow could be seen as the ghastly apotheosis of the New Apocalypse: the badness carried to absurdity! There is perhaps more wit and freedom about, but whether there is any less looseness of thought or looseness of craft, I doubt."

The poems in Poetry Dimension I are, in a sense, transitional: many rhyme, to some degree or other; nearly all contain 'the ghost of some simple meter'. There are a couple of short poems by Seamus Heaney, who at the time would have been in his early 30's. There are also a couple by D. J. (Dennis Joseph) Enright, who was born in 1920; however his first book of poetry was published in 1968. Enright, like Pound, was a student of oriental languages and culture, and his poetry reads more like 'modern' poetry than others in this compilation. There are also two poems by Phillip Larkin (1922-1985), a very highly regarded English poet, who, although he occasionally wrote without benefit of rhyme, was none the less generally writing rhymed verse close to the fixed forms up to his death.

There is no doubt that Crow represents a completely different poetic in England: it follows the path American poetry was taking, not only that of Plath, but also (for example) Anne Sexton (1928-1974) whose poetry is noted for its confessional intensity. She suffered successive mental breakdowns and recoveries, and finally, like Plath, committed suicide. Of Crow, she wrote "Let all the poets of the world bow down their heads in admiration and awe. Ted Hughes's Crow has done it and it will last for generations."

The point is, that thirteen years later, in 1984, Ted Hughes was appointed English Poet Laureate, following John Betjeman; Betjeman had been appointed in 1972, just about the time of the Robson compilation (it is interesting that Betjeman does not appear, and is not even mentioned, in it!). He was a largely formal poet, with a precise eye and ear for the character of the England that was then disappearing. The difference between his 'voice' and that of Hughes is very clear. In many ways, therefore, this whole period could be regarded as a nexus for poetry in England. However, it is still not clear to what extent English poetry has continued to move in the direction that Hughes pointed.

Perhaps we can address this issue in a later article.

OK. If you are feeling at this point that I am not giving you any clear guidelines for how to write free verse, you are exactly right! This is because neither the poets, nor the critics, nor the scholars have been able to describe what free verse is; who the reader is expected to be; and any objective criteria for discovering the difference between good free verse and bad free verse. Or, often, the difference between free verse and typographically arranged prose. In a sense, if you read a particular free verse poem, and it speaks to you, it has succeeded, and (for you at least) it is therefore good. You need to ask yourself how it has achieved its objective, and you will be able to develop guidelines which have meaning for your own writing.

A word which appears in a number of discussions of free verse is 'cadence', and this may be a useful concept. In Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature cadence is defined as: (1) A rhythmic sequence or flow of sounds in language; specifically, a particular rhythmic sequence distinctive of an individual author or literary composition. (2) The rising or falling order of strong, long, or stressed syllables and weak, short, or unstressed syllables. (3) An unmetrical or irregular arrangement of stressed syllables in prose or free verse that is based on natural stress groups. The definitions in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) are, as one might expect, rather more extensive than this, but it includes some illustrative uses of the word. Perhaps the most relevant for us is (as usual!) from Shakespeare in Love's Labour's Lost: "You find not the apostrophes, and so miss the accent: let me supervise the canzonet. Here are only numbers ratified; but, for the elegance, facility, and golden cadence of poesy, caret." (Act IV, Scene II, line 126). (caret is from the Latin carere, and it means "it misses"). W. H. Auden (1907-1973) wrote, in Anthem for St. Cecelia's Day (1942):

In a garden shady this holy lady
With a reverent cadence and subtle psalm,
Like a black swan as death came on
Poured forth her song in perfect calm:

The point about cadence as a concept is that it embodies Williams's concerns about the natural patterns of speech, so that national differences might be expected; however, it also leads into the trap of regional variations and societal variations. The 'contract' to which Beyers refers between the poet and the knowledgeable reader implies a sharing of speech patterns so that the cadence is understood, but this also implies what I think can be called an 'in group' attitude. As I said in one of the earliest articles in this series, my idea of poetry is universalist in both space and time, and indeed in social position, educational background, and age. I am aware that there are numerous traps along that path, too; but anything that smacks of elitism is quite contrary to the apparent views of certainly the large majority of the poets I admire, and to the history of poetry, from Homer through Shakespeare, Whitman, Browning, Keats, Yeats, Auden, and (whatever others may think!) Eliot, Pound, and Heaney, to mention just a few. It is in this context that (ultimately) Modern Verse will be judged, and I believe that poets themselves would concur.

So: my own preference is to follow the path of listening for the poet's 'voice' and looking for the ghost of the meter (the cadence, if you will) that lies behind or plays against the poem; but from what I have said above you will gather that that is probably because of my familiarity and sympathy with the centuries of development that led to this point through Browning, Yeats, Pound, and Eliot. However, in visual arts I can follow similar paths that none the less lead me to an understanding and enjoyment of art that appears to be the product of a discontinuous revolution, because after a time I recognize that it has in fact grown out of its history. When I first heard Charlie Parker I found it difficult to relate to his music, but now I recognize its relationship to the sources, and it no longer seems to be radical, but an extension and perhaps a redirection or development of the main stream. However, one must also remember that along these paths there are many whitening skeletons of experiments that led nowhere.

When all is over, the principle remains the same. Poetry occupies a place in our cultural lives which is, and must continue to be, unique; and the basic rule remains the same as I stated it in a much earlier article in this series. I can do no better than to repeat it here!

Envoi

Prince: remember Graves's advice to make sense. Remember Pope's contempt for the trivial rhyme. Remember what Shakespeare could do with almost no modifiers. Read the poems you most like as though you were a critic, and think about how the poet achieved the result that speaks to you. Think about the reader who you will never know. Think carefully about why you have chosen poetry as your medium rather than prose. And, most importantly, remember that your chosen tool is the remarkable English language.

Search always for the right word!