Free Verse

 It was my star turn at Portsmouth Poetry Society this evening, some thoughts on free verse having been my theme for this year's programme. It went very well with a good turnout, not necessarily due to me being the advertised box office attraction.

I hadn't been entirely convinced about my introduction and so had circulated James Fenton on the subject, too, but it went well enough with the kindly people of PPS so here is another chapter towards some eventual Collected Essays.

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Free Verse

Two of the best known remarks about ‘free verse’ are Robert Frost’s, regarding Carl Sandburg, that it is like ‘playing tennis without a net’ and that it is ‘cut-up prose’ which is less easy to attribute to anyone in particular. They both contain within them the idea that free verse isn’t quite the ‘real thing’ but it is for me because, after all these years, I’ve settled on a definition of a poem that says it is,

a statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.

That might not be the most ambitious or Romantic idea of what poetry is and some will find it underwhelming but poetry is a wide church and ‘in my father’s house are many homes’.

In trying to find out where free verse all began I expected to find evidence of it before C19th France but I haven’t. Homer, Horace and Ovid didn’t see any reason to rhyme but they are devout in their adherence to their sometimes complex rhythmic patterns. In one of his most amusing excursions, Simon Armitage explained the structure of one of the medieval poems he has translated, possibly Gawain and The Green Knight, and for thousands of years, it seems, poetry was a very disciplined art.

‘Verse’ implies structure, the most easily found definition on the internet being, 

writing arranged with a metrical rhythm, typically having a rhyme.

‘Poetry’ doesn’t have to be that. The same source gives, 

literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.

That might not be the whole story but a significant difference between the two definitions is ‘arranged’. Perhaps free verse likes to pretend that it hasn’t been quite so deliberately ‘arranged’ but I’d be disappointed if it hadn’t.

Wherever there’s an accepted rule there will always be somebody who sees fit to break it and claim for themselves some sort of revolutionary status. Artists, including poets, are often among the sort of people who enjoy being iconoclastic. That’s fine. Go ahead.France in the C19th might also have been where the other, equally apparently oxymoronic ‘prose poem’ emerged. They were busy, trying their damnedest to break rules. Neither those who think that poetry should rhyme or those who think that they’re part of a revolution need do any more than show us a good one.

Rhyme might also have come into English poetry from Italy or France in the Middle Ages, Italian and French being languages in which it can be difficult to avoid rhyme whereas in English one has to try a bit harder and, often to subtle effect, use ‘half-rhymes’. In English, with it being more difficult to achieve, it can be either richer if done carefully or look awkward if the rhyme has appeared to dictate the choice of words. And there are those who still think they don’t have anything to do with metre, syllable counts, rhymes or word patterning because their ‘voice’ is pure and natural.

Unfortunately for them, the language will have done it for them. Having accepted language, rather than, say, colour or music, as their medium, they have made themselves its prisoner. The late, great Roddy Lumsden once told of poets who showed him poems that they said contained none of the verbal effects traditionally associated with ‘poetry’ until he had a look and pointed out inadvertent assonance, rhythm and all such other linguistic ‘special effects’ taught in school as being those things to be identified and appreciated as ‘poetry’. The effect of such prescriptive teaching was to put many pupils off poetry for good, as if it was a homework exercise to be answered, an equation to be solved or some scripture that revealed wisdom rather than something to be enjoyed.

Perhaps language can’t help being poetry. Tony Harrison once reported over-hearing perfect iambic pentameter on a train in the sentence, 

He worked for British Gypsum outside Leek.

It happens whether you want it to or not. The point about poetry, or art of any kind, is that it is presented as such, as per the ‘found objects’ of Marcel Duchamp and the Modernist debt to France seems bottomless. We could spend less time worrying whether a poem is ‘poetry’ or not and concern ourselves more with whether it’s any good or not.

What ‘free verse’ needs to do is establish itself as something other than ‘chopped-up prose’ and it might do that by demonstrating that it has achieved cohesion and artistic effect however it sees fit. That might be deciding where the lines end, internal rhythms, semantic fields or even the failed attempt to avoid any such thing.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as ‘free verse’ and it lives a deluded life, like so many of us possibly do, believing itself to be free when it can’t be, a bit like Jean-Paul Sartre. 

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What I decided in the end was that I don't first concern myself in music with time signatures or what key it's in. Neither do I worry whether, say, Billie Holliday is jazz, soul or blues. It's only a matter of whether it's any good or not and I found T.S. Eliot coming to a similar conclusion in his 1917 essay, Reflections on Vers Libre, that,
we conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and 'vers libre'  does not exist, there is only good verse, bad verse and chaos.

Great minds might think alike but also mine thought likke his did.