So much for genre. Let’s return to the subjects of shaping and of formal means.
1. The most common free verse stanza is variable.
The reasons for this are pretty obvious—if one is going to get rid of meter under the theory that the poem should find its own rhythm, it seems to follow that it should also find its own stanza pattern. Equally important was the fact that fixed stanza lengths in metrical poetry were tied to rhyme schemes, so that, when end rhyme was not used, the main technical reason for uniform stanzas disappeared.
Both rhyme and meter in short poems were connected, of course, to their origin as lyrics—words to accompany music, which was also a reason for the repeated formal patterns. The first divergence of lyric from music in English occurred with the invention of printing, and from the 1550s to the 1850s the short poem for the most part continued to be organized, fundamentally, on the metaphor of song. The departure from fixed stanzas was the second divergence.
2. That is why—outside the ode forms—Walt Whitman was, as far as I know, the first poet in the English language to experiment with the variable stanza, and “Song of Myself” is the first fruit of those experiments. It’s strange, reading the poem, to realize that hardly anyone had ever done before what Whitman was doing with the stanza. His explicit notion of what he was doing was based on analogy to nature:
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always
substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed
of life.
To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.
Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well
entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.
3. A decade later French vers libre was launched, and its early practitioners, also free to vary stanza length, were more inclined to use that possibility to startle, to abruptly shift subjects or tones. The appeal was not so much to nature but to mind, to the creative freedom of the artist, or to the creative compulsion of the artist whose loyalty was to something other than formal regularity. This came into English most dramatically in Eliot’s imitation of Jules Laforgue in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1917:
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floor of silent seas.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted . . .
4. It is an interesting fact about the development of Wallace Stevens that there are eighteen poems in Harmonium (1923) in the variable free verse stanza, and after that he only wrote three or four in the next thirty years. It was for him a thing of the 1910s, of vers libre as the new poets were trying to adapt it. Here is H.D., the first poem in her first volume Sea Garden in 1916:
Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meager flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,
more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem—
you are caught in the drift.
Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.
Can the spice rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf?
She tends to vary stanza length all through her early work from 1912 to 1944 and then returned to fixed stanzas for Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. Here is D. H. Lawrence in 1917:
When she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.
She drips herself with water, and her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and falling roses, and I listen
For the sluicing of their rain-disheveled petals.
In the window full of sunlight
Concentrates her golden shadow
Fold on fold, until it glows as
Mellow as the glory roses.
This is the Lawrence who wrote in 1918: “Free verse toes no melodic line, no matter what drill-sergeant . . . We can get rid of the stereotyped movements and the hackneyed associations of sound and sense. We can break the stiff neck of habit . . . free verse has its own nature, that . . . is neither star nor pearl, but instantaneous like plasm . . . It has no finish. It has no satisfying stability, satisfying to those who like the immutable. None of this.”
Here is Williams in 1920:
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to waken
It’s interesting to wonder whether the impulse of Whitman or of Laforgue applies to this poem with its last processional quatrains.
5. Both of these ideas would get articulated in one way or another during the free verse revival of the ’50s and ’60s in the notions of “organic form” and “projective verse.” The modernist architect’s credo applies and was applied: “Form follows function.” Very close to Robert Creeley’s remark that “Form is always an extension of content.” But it is often not so simple. There are poems like W. S. Merwin’s “December Night” in which the stanza functions like a paragraph:
The cold slope is standing in darkness.
But the south of the trees is dry to the touch.
The heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathers
I came to watch these
White plants older at night
The oldest
Comes first to the ruins
And I hear magpies kept awake by the moon
The water flows through its
Own fingers without end
Tonight once more
I find a single prayer and it is not for men
There is also a careful mix, or what appears to be a careful mix, that exists somewhere between a proposed order and a discovered one, as in Robert Duncan’s “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”:
as if it were a scene made up by the mind,
that is not mine, but a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows, that are forms fall.
Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.
She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.
It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going down
whose secret we see in a children’s game
of ring a round of roses told.
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,
that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.
This could hardly be more delicately patterned. And a place to observe that one of the typical procedures of the poem with variable stanza length is to establish a base—here the couplet—and depart from it and return to it. The pattern here is 2-3-2-3-3-3-2-3-2. And it seems to merge the idea of form as a following of the contour of a thought with the idea of form as a made thing.
6. —so that in the variable stanza of the free verse poem there is an expressive spectrum—from poems whose order is intended to seem natural and invisible to ones in which an order asserts itself in such a way that it seems not simply a function of subject matter, but of perception or made rhythm, implies the poet as maker rather than the poet as acolyte to some natural order in things.
7. On this subject I often think of Barbara Hepworth, the English sculptor. Her early work, like her friend Henry Moore’s, is a celebration of natural forms; the wood has beautifully the shape of wood reaching toward light, its stone the contour of worn stone. In the midst of this work, in St. Ives, on the Cornwall coast, she became pregnant by the painter Ben Nicholson, who let her know that he had no interest in becoming a father. She continued to work, understanding the child would be hers, and she had triplets. Which altered her attitude toward nature. And her work—that I’ve seen—is immediately much more abstract, as if she had shifted allegiances from Stephen Dedalus to Samuel Beckett. To put a thing, a pillar, a stone, next to another pillar, or stone, proposes a form. To put three objects of any kind next to one another is to propose a relation and is a form. The whole idea of this-in-relation-to-that seems suddenly and profoundly mysterious.
See Denise Levertov, “Some Notes on Organic Form” and Lynn Hejinian: “The Rejection of Closure” and also Marjorie Perloff: “The Return of the (Numerical) Repressed.”