1. “Free verse” is the term that has come to be used for poems written in lines, but without a set meter, that is, without a fixed rule governing the number and position of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Some history: Anglo-Saxon verse was accentual. It was composed in a fixed number of stressed syllables per line. The measure was four stresses marked by a strong caesural pause for a pattern of 2/2. The historian of prosody George Saintsbury remarks that, when Norman French with its typically rising rhythm in the pronunciation of two- and three-syllable words got married to the German dialect of Anglo-Saxon with its typically falling rhythm in its two- and three-syllable words, English became what he calls “a country dance” of rising and falling rhythms out of which metrical poetry, or accentual syllabic verse, emerged.
So when nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, after some four to five hundred years of accentual-syllabic verse, began to experiment with verse lines that did not have this fixed form, what they were doing got called free verse. It might well have been called accentual verse because its rhythms are based on the patterning of stresses (though not the position of unstressed syllables), but in practice people reserved that term for poems in which the number of accents per line was fixed.
Accentual verse in that sense—four stresses per line, three or five stresses per line—is, in my experience, relatively rare. And the poets I’ve talked to about it or read writing about it seem to have different notions of what constitutes a stressed syllable. Much more common is verse in which most lines have the same number of stresses mixed with other lines that have one or two more or less stresses. So there is a free verse that roughly approximates a metrical trimeter or tetrameter or pentameter.
2. The term “free verse” began as a translation of the French phrase vers libre, though French vers libre tended, in the nineteenth century, to be loosely metrical and to rhyme, but just not in a regular pattern. “Loosely metrical” means that you can still hear the predominance of a specific meter, usually an iambic meter. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” for example, begins with a singsong line of headless iambic meter:
Lét/ ŭs gó/ thĕn yóu/ an̆d Í
And the next line is roughly iambic:
Whi̇̆le th̆e ev́e/ ni̇̆ng iś/ spréad oút/ ăgaínst/ th̆e sḱy
(This could be scanned as mostly anapestic if you demote the accent on “out”:
Whi̇̆le th̆e ev́e/ ni̇̆ng i̇̆s spréad/ oŭt ăgaínst/ th̆e sḱy
But from the point of view of “loose free verse” anapests are just skipping iambs.)
Even the notorious third line is iambic:
Li̇̆ke ă pá/ tiĕnt et́h/ er̆iźed/ ŭpón/ ă táb/ le.
The first line has four feet, the next two are loose pentameter. I think Eliot thought of this as vers libre, in the French manner.
In the beginning of Wallace Stevens’ s “Of Mere Being,” written forty or fifty years later, the first line can be read as loosely iambic, that is, as an iamb and two anapests:
The palm/ at the end/ of the mind
And the next line can also be fitted, perhaps forced into a roughly metrical pattern:
Beyond/ the last/ thought ris/ es
That is, an iamb, an iamb, a spondee, an unstressed final syllable, and probably if the next line were regularly iambic, it would have reinforced this sense of pattern, but it doesn’t quite:
In the bronze distance.
It could be scanned this way:
In̆ th̆e/ brónze dís/ tan̆ce
as a trochee and a spondee and an unaccented final syllable, or in this way as an anapest and a trochee:
In̆ th̆e brónze/ dístan̆ce
Or in this way as a double iamb with a final unaccented syllable:
In̆ th̆e brónze dís/ tan̆ce,
And the fact that it can be scanned so many different ways tells you that the deep pattern hasn’t been established. But it is probably this nearness to being scannable that gives the lines the feeling of orderliness, and in that way it is also almost vers libre, a trimeter line, another trimeter line with an extra syllable, a dimeter line with an extra syllable. But probably not. Probably we are in the territory of free verse, and to think about the rhythm we can mark the stressed syllables:
The paĺm at the eńd of the mínd,
Beyońd the laśt thoúght ríses
In the brońze dístance,
And begin to think about what kind of patterning we are hearing. There are three stresses, for example, in the first line, four in the second, two in the third. Statement, amplification, compression would be the patterning of the lines we hear, but it is more complicated than that. In the poem’s second line, we are hearing a distinct pause, not just four beats, but three beats and then one more. One might mark this:
3
4 (3/1)
2
and then notice that the stanza is made of three phrases and that each phrase—“the palm at the end of the mind,” “beyond the last thought,” “rises in the bronze distance”—contains three stressed syllables. If Stevens had placed “rises” on the third line, the stanza would have had three stressed syllables per line. Verse that has the same number of accented syllables per line is called accentual verse, and so this isn’t accentual verse, or it is accentual verse without the rule that there has to be the same number of stressed syllables per line, and so free verse.
But that doesn’t mean that we don’t hear the pattern of three phrases each with three accented syllables; we do. And when Stevens ends the second line on a fourth stressed syllable with “rises,” he throws the balance in the first two phrases off, but then he does complete it, by giving us two stressed syllable to go with the excess stressed syllable in the previous line, which is, I am pretty sure, why the music of this stanza is so appealing.
To complicate the matter; Wallace Stevens revised the first stanza of “Of Mere Being.” The final version of the poem reads:
The palm at the end of the mind
Beyond the last thought rises
In the bronze décor.
This makes for a very great difference in the poem’s way of thinking about our relationship to reality, and it makes a small, crucial difference in the rhythmic organization of those three lines by ending the stanza on a distinctly iambic sound. Line ends and especially stanza ends act like magnets. They organize what comes before them. “In the bronze distance” is loosely iambic. “In the bronze décor” ends with an emphatic iamb.
3. So free verse doesn’t have a set rule about the number and position of stressed and unstressed syllables, but it does have stressed and unstressed syllables, and they are—as in speech—patterned more or less rhythmically, and though you can’t scan the lines, you can inspect the degree and kind of patterning that’s going on in them. And, as I hope these examples make clear, free verse flirts with metrical verse all the time, so that there is or can be a fluid movement from metrical verse to vers libre to accentual verse to free verse in the same poem, as it discovers and expresses the kind of and level of orderliness there is in the thought and emotion of the poem. By itself “The palm at the end of the mind” could be or could not be a metrical line. We need to hear more to know what pattern is being made. But we do hear the pattern. We hear the skipping anapests of “at the end/ of the mind” whether the whole poem is metrical or not. The basic play of rising and falling rhythms goes on in free verse as it does in speech and it is full of the echoes of the patterns imposed by the structure of the spoken language and regularized by poetic meters.
4. So, in practice:
* Lines serve best as a measure if they are predominantly end-stopped, or if they contain predominantly the same number of stressed syllables.
* To the extent that enjambment undercuts our hearing the line as a measure, we hear the phrase rather than the line as measure, and the typographical line becomes mainly a visual effect rather than an auditory one. (It’s been argued that the visual experience affects the auditory one, that seeing the line break, even if we don’t hear it, is enough to create a sense of measure. I’m not so sure. This is the interestingly hazy area in written poetry between the spoken-out-loud auditory experience of a poem and the heard-as-performed-in-the-mind auditory experience of the poem.)
* In free verse as in metrical verse, there is play between the line as measure and the phrase as measure. You could write lines of four stresses, employing clauses, units of sense, with three stresses, and you’d hear the interplay.
* There is usually an accentual base, and it usually gets announced in the first line, as in music:
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow
You can read the verb in the first line, emphasizing either must or have, depending on how you read the drama of it, but in either case only one of the two receives stress.
It establishes a base of four stresses, is followed by a line with three stresses, and (I hear pine-trees as two stresses, but one could hear it as one, emphasis on pine) returns to four in the third line.
5. Divigation on enjambment, pauses in normal speech, and the line end:
Whenas in silks (pause) my Julia goes (pause)
Then, then, methinks (pause) how sweetly flows (pause)
The liquefaction (slight pause) of her clothes (pause)
And when I cast mine eyes and see (pause)
Those brave vibrations, (pause) each way free, (pause)
Oh! How that glittering (pause) taketh me. (stop)
After great pain (pause) a formal feeling comes (pause)
The nerves sit ceremonious (pause) as tombs (pause)
The stiff heart questions (pause) Was it he (pause) that bore? (pause)
And yesterday? (pause) or centuries before? (pause)
Nature’s first green (pause) is gold,(pause)
Her hardest hue to hold (pause)
Her early leaf’s a flower (pause)
But only so an hour. (pause)
Then leaf subsides to leaf. (pause)
So Eden sank to grief (pause)
So dawn goes down to day (pause)
Nothing gold can stay. (stop)
This is by way of reminding you that poems are made out of an exquisite play of phrases and pauses.
Pauses, stops, are determined partly by context and partly by the normal rules that govern speech rhythm. The important thing is to notice that there are places in spoken English where there are typically pauses between words and places where there aren’t. We have learned to pause at the end of a noun phrase—The redheaded boy / rode his bike/ to the store. We know where the pauses are and where they aren’t. Notice that in the sentence “The boy went to the store,” there is not a pause between the subject and the verb, and that if you add an adjective, there is. We picked up these rules in the high chair. (And play with language the way we played with oatmeal.)
Denise Levertov had a quite specific way of thinking about pauses and the line end. A line end period was a full stop. A comma at line end was half a period. A breath pause without punctuation at line end was half a comma. A line end where there was no breath pause had no pause but threw slightly more emphasis onto whatever word began the next line. It was more for the eye than the ear.
If you listen to contemporary poets read, you find that some of them give pause to an enjambed line end when there is no breath pause, and some don’t. I have the impression that it was Robert Creeley who introduced the disjunctive pause at the end of a line in his way of reading his poems aloud. “You were/pause/ not in/pause/the room.” In his work it made for the sense that the poem was interrogating its own syntax. What does in mean, really? And what is the? the hesitations at line end seem to say. What are these so-called natural units of speech? It made one feel that where there was fluency, there needed to be interrogating gaps, something like the way a musician like Miles Davis interrogates the formal habits that underlie melody. I also have the impression that this technique in the hands of younger poets writing without Creeley’s particular urgency descended into mannerism very quickly.
6. Violent, or ragged, or kinetic enjambments: In the history of metrical poetry, there just aren’t instances of enjambment, that is, of ending the line, where there is not a pause in ordinary speech. The metaphysical poets came nearest to it. They wanted thought to feel knotty and sometimes used what felt like violent enjambment to suggest it. Here is George Herbert in a poem called “Denial”:
When my devotions could not pierce
Thy silent eares;
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse:
My breast was full of fears
And disorder:
My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow,
Did flie asunder:
Each took his way; some would to pleasures go,
Some to the warres and thunder
Of alarms
As good go anywhere, they say,
As to benumme
Both knees and heart, in crying night and day,
Come, come, my God, O come,
But no hearing.
His example was picked up in some of Hart Crane—here is the beginning of “Lachrymae Christi”:
Whitely, while benzene
Rinsings from the moon
Dissolve all but the windows of the mills
(Inside the sure machinery
Is still
And curdled only where a sill
Sluices its one unyielding smile)
Immaculate venom binds
The fox’s teeth, and swart
Thorns freshen on the year’s
First blood . . .
and the early poems of Robert Lowell, as in this from “Colloquy in Black Rock” (which uses the word nigger as an adjective at a time when a white novelist, Carl Van Vechten, could call a book about Harlem Nigger Heaven):
Here the jackhammer jabs into the ocean;
My heart, you race and stagger and demand
More blood-gangs for your nigger-brass percussions,
Till I, the stunned machine of your devotion,
Clanging upon the cymbal of a hand,
Am rattled screw and footloose. All discussions
End in the mud-flat detritus of death.
My heart, beat faster, faster. In Black Mud
Hungarian workmen give their blood
For the martyre Stephen, who was stoned to death
but instances are rare, and needed to be rare. If using the line and line end that way were common practice, the mild shock of the effect would be lost. It was in the early experiments with free verse that the line end where there is no breath pause become common. Here is William Carlos Williams in 1917, playing with ending lines on articles, on the space between an adjective and its noun in “Summer Song”:
Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,—
a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer’s smile—
(Here is the pattern of stresses per line: 2/1/3/1/3/2/1/2/1/2. Here is the pattern that a listener might hear of accent based on verbal units between natural pauses: 2/4/6/4/2. In the recordings I’ve heard of Williams reading, he doesn’t pause—in the early poems—if there is not a natural breath pause in the syntax. So how eye and ear negotiate these two rhythms, each in its way symmetrical, is an interesting question.)
7. Syllabics: Another of the practices of twentieth-century poetry is composing with a fixed number of syllables per line. One can do that by having the same number of syllables in every line—here is an example from Kenneth Rexroth, a bit of an erotic poem called “Inversely As the Square of Their Distances Apart,” written in eight-syllable lines:
At the wood’s edge in the moonlight
We dropped our clothes and stood naked,
Swaying, shadow mottled, enclosed
In each other and together
Closed in the night. We did not hear
The whip-poor-will, nor the aspen’s
Whisper; the owl flew silently
Or cried out loud, we did not know.
We could not hear beyond the heart.
We could not see the moving dark
And light, the stars that stood or moved,
The stars that fell. Did they all fall
We had not known. We were falling
Like meteors, dark through cold black,
Toward each other, and then compact,
Blazing through air into earth.
Or one can have the same number of syllables in corresponding lines of each stanza, as in Marianne Moore’s “The Fish,” in which the title serves as a first line. Moore was the poet who experimented most with a quirky syllabic stanzas. Becoming Marianne Moore (2002) is a fascinating place to watch her at work. They print a 1918 magazine version of the poem in quatrains, so that it begins, after the title, “Wade through black jade. / Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one” and the 1924 version in intricate six-line syllabic stanzas. The first two lines of that version begins simply “Wade / through black jade.” The syllabic pattern in this version of the poem is 1/3/9/6/8. It makes for a jaunty, even a defiant, willfulness in the relation of the maker to the attaining. As if, to quote Sharon Olds’s remark, Moore had adopted the motto of the medieval French guild of secateurs, the cutters of cloth. Their crest read, “I cut where I will.” If you mark the stresses, you can see that syllabics don’t typically have the same number of stresses per line. But poems that have the same number of syllables per line, like Rexroth’s, tend to have a loose sort of regularity, two to four stresses, or three to five stresses per line, as does a lot of free verse, if it is composed in lines of roughly equal length.
8. Which syllables are stressed in free verse? Answer: the same syllables that are stressed in ordinary speech—(1) all semantically important words, (2) at least one syllable in all words of more than one syllable, and (3) other words that receive rhetorical emphasis as determined by context (or italics, or some other signal of emphasis).
April is the cruelest month, breeding
—has four stresses on the four semantically important syllables. (It also, in the middle, has a faintly iambic lilt: ril is/ the cruel/ est month/.) The next line—
Lilacs out of the dead earth, mixing
—has four semantically important syllables, five if you count the “out” in “out of.” This is a slight swelling of the pattern in the previous line, so we are not in the territory of an accentual meter, and it doesn’t quite have an iambic lilt. “Breeding” and “lilacs” and “mixing” and “out of” are all strong falling rhythms. The pattern of the two lines also shares a strong rhythmic pause: 3/1, 4/1. The next line,
Memory and desire, stirring
—has three stressed syllables, a contraction, and it continues the pattern of strong pauses, which is now 3/1, 4/1, 2/1, a tipping and pushing forward motion that is going to make coming to the end of the sentence feel like a closing, and since it is the beginning of the poem, also a sort of opening signature:
Dull roots with spring rain.
So one way to describe the accentual pattern the lines make is 4, 4, 3, 4; another is to notice the balancing act, 3/1, 5/1, 2/1, 2/2. Odd/odd, odd/odd, even/odd, even/even.
The imagination, Robert Duncan said, is shapely and this is certainly true, or can be true, of the aural imagination in poetry. It’s always at work.
9. “Form,” Robert Creeley wrote in the 1950s, “is always an extension of content.” Published among the statements on poetics at the end of Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry, it read at the time as a rebellion against metrical poetry and the display forms of mastery implied by fixed forms like the sonnet and the sestina. The idea was that you didn’t impose a pattern on your thought or perception; you let the perception or the thought give you the pattern. The other critical document in the Allen anthology was Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” which seemed to expand on Creeley’s sentence. Olson argued that the shape of a poem ought to track, or map, the movement of its thought or set of thoughts. Its shape was a picture of the energy of its making. In Ezra Pound’s terms, it was an ideogram. A formed thing. A poem was, or should be, the shape of its thought or perception, and what prosody should do is keep the thought moving.
George Oppen, in interviews in the 1960s and in a conversation we had, slowed down Olson’s high adrenaline aesthetic. Prosody, he said, was a moral matter, because its work was analytic. A poem ought to reflect accurately the shape and order of a perception. Language can’t correspond absolutely to the thing it names, but it can present, in any given instance, the order of the apprehension of an object. And of the way an object is attached to a thought. And feelings come from thoughts. You have to think you are in danger to feel fear. (George had been in the infantry in France.) You have to think of some good to be happy. So the perception implies, stated or not, the thought, and the thought, stated or not, implies the feeling. So I imagine his imaginative process on what he called, quoting Martin Heidegger, “the arduous path of appearance,” went something like this: First the brick of an American city, smudged with smoke. Then the young girl on the street and the hand-me-downs or garish, inexpensive new clothes that define her social class and the vulnerability it implies, and then perhaps her gait, which makes her particular and gives her poignance. And then his thought of the world as a sort of container, which gave him the title of his third book, This In Which. So he proposes that the question of form for a poet in the realist tradition is ethical, a matter of getting the meeting place of thought and perception right.
I heard Denise Levertov elaborate on these ideas in a lecture hall in Fort Worden, Washington. You are standing at a picture window in a suburban neighborhood. It’s morning. You look out the window, the big picture window in the living room (it’s not your house), and you see a pool of blood, bright red, and the body, goldish, of a squirrel on the concrete driveway, which is surrounded, I think she said “embowered,” by the intense green of summer trees. Apparently the owner, backing out of her garage, had run over the squirrel. She proceeded to speak about how one organized the order of the perceptions. First, the pool of blood? Or the color red seen before it resolves itself into a meaning? Or the fact of being in a stranger’s house? Of being the “I,” later critics would call it “the subject position,” in the situation implied by a picture window? It turned out to be a complicated matter. It might involve false starts. It might be, in the end, that the music, the rhythm of the feeling, would give you the way to an appropriate ordering of the images, or lead you away from what you thought was the point, the specific perception of the dead squirrel. Might take you somewhere else altogether.
10. And poems don’t necessarily begin with perceptions: Kenneth Koch, James Tate, Dean Young. They may begin with something the imagination proposes and track thought, track association, or dream logic, or a rhythm of movement of thought or feeling that the words try to keep up with. Form then would have to do with fidelity to that movement. Something like this gets said in Robert Duncan’s series, “The Structure of Rime.” The second poem in the series begins: “What of the Structure of Rime, I asked.” And the poem provides this answer, which has stayed in my mind for years though I’m not sure yet that I understand it: “An absolute scale of resemblance and disresemblance establishes measures that are music in the actual world.”
11. Conversation with Brenda Hillman. Walking on a trail in a white fir forest, summer, the Sierras, a ragged border on the trail of the wildflowers that (like certain enjambments) prefer disturbed ground: poems begin for me in one of four ways, either with a scrap of musical language, or an idea, or an image, or 80 percent of the time, from the pressure of an inchoate feeling that turns into an idea or an image or a scrap of musical language.
12. Stanley Kunitz saying there were three ways a poem moves: in a straight line from A to B, in a circle beginning with A and passing through various place and coming back to A, or by braiding two, three, even five elements in such a way that by the end their relation to each other becomes clear. And I said, “What about pointillism or a Calder mobile, where elements just hang there in relation to each other or not, the connection unstated?” And Stanley, “Yes, that would be a fourth way.” “Or a list,” I said, “that would just be A A A A.” “Yes, yes,” said Stanley, getting a little weary.
13. The work of prosody in free verse, as in metrical verse, comes once the poem is under way. The twos and threes, or the fours and threes and then fours; the choice of making stanzas or not making stanzas, what kind of line endings—that work. You are hearing a poem that is grave and slow, or charged and relentless, or hesitant, or easy and fluid, the sense of sound, arc of development, play with undevelopment, image- or thought-cascade occurring and telling you what it wants to be, form and content beginning to be a body. The final form exactly right, or not—seeming just okay, adequate to the task, but not radiant, not the radiance.