Tweet
Free Verse
Also called “Open Poem”, or sometimes vers libre by the French, it has no regular meter or line length and depends on natural speech rhythms and the counterpoint of stressed and unstressed syllables. In the hands of a gifted poet it can acquire rhythms and melodies of its own.
Its origins are obscure. There are signs of it in medieval alliterative verse and in the Authorized Bible translations of the Psalms and The Song of Songs. Milton was clearly experimenting with it in Lycidas and Samson Agonistes. Interest in its possibilities was renewed in Europe after the period of Neoclassicism. Heine and Goethe (in Germany), Bertrand, Hugo and Baudelaire (in France), Macpherson, Smart, Blake and Arnold (in England) were some of the better known writers who experimented. It was very probably Walt Whitman, the American poet (who influenced Baudelaire), who did more than anyone else to develop it. The other main innovator in the 19th c. was Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the 20th c. many poets employed it, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and William Carlos Williams. The following example comes from Whitman’s After the Sea-ship:
After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds,
After the white-grey sails taut to their spars and ropes,
Below, a myriad myriad waves hastening, lifting up their necks,
Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship,
Waves of the ocean bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,
Waves, undulating waves, liquid, uneven emulous waves,
Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,
Where the great vessel sailing and tacking displaced the surface.
Source: J. A. Cuddon; Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory; forth edition 1998, revised by C.E.Preston.
Also called “Open Poem”, or sometimes vers libre by the French, it has no regular meter or line length and depends on natural speech rhythms and the counterpoint of stressed and unstressed syllables. In the hands of a gifted poet it can acquire rhythms and melodies of its own.
Its origins are obscure. There are signs of it in medieval alliterative verse and in the Authorized Bible translations of the Psalms and The Song of Songs. Milton was clearly experimenting with it in Lycidas and Samson Agonistes. Interest in its possibilities was renewed in Europe after the period of Neoclassicism. Heine and Goethe (in Germany), Bertrand, Hugo and Baudelaire (in France), Macpherson, Smart, Blake and Arnold (in England) were some of the better known writers who experimented. It was very probably Walt Whitman, the American poet (who influenced Baudelaire), who did more than anyone else to develop it. The other main innovator in the 19th c. was Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the 20th c. many poets employed it, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and William Carlos Williams. The following example comes from Whitman’s After the Sea-ship:
After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds,
After the white-grey sails taut to their spars and ropes,
Below, a myriad myriad waves hastening, lifting up their necks,
Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship,
Waves of the ocean bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,
Waves, undulating waves, liquid, uneven emulous waves,
Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,
Where the great vessel sailing and tacking displaced the surface.
Source: J. A. Cuddon; Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory; forth edition 1998, revised by C.E.Preston.