Robert Wallace begins the first paragraph of his essay, "Meter in English" (in Meter in English, q.v. bibliography, below) with an assertion that others have made before him: "The difference that distinguishes verse from prose or speech is the unit of line." Not so. Much more than merely the existence of "lines" in the genre of "poetry" distinguishes verse from prose, the only modes of language in which any genre (fiction, drama, poetry) may be written.
Wallace begins his second paragraph with another disputable sentence: "In free verse, the units of line are or appear arbitrary, that is, relatively unpredictable." What I object to here is the use of the undefined term "free verse," as though such a term makes sense, for, to reiterate, there are only two modes in which any genre can be written, prose and verse. Prose is unmetered language; verse is metered language.
If Wallace wishes to take exception to this definition, he should direct his remarks to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary which notes as the first definition of prose, "The ordinary form of written or spoken language, without metrical structure" [emphasis added]. Similarly, the first definition of verse in the OED is, "A succession of words arranged according to natural or recognized rules of prosody and forming a complete metrical line [emphasis added]." The first definition of metre, "To compose or put into metre," according to the Oxford, is obsolete; the second is, "To compose verses; to versify." Wallace, like many traditional prosodists, seems to have forgotten that the term "free verse" came to us in the twentieth century from the nineteenth-century French vers libre, but adopting a foreign term does not rewrite history, nor change the definitions in our dictionaries. As to the concept of "line" rather than "meter" being primary in the recognition of "verse," nowhere in the OED can one find that verse means "a line of language," only that a verse may mean "one of the lines of a poem or piece of versification."
Wallace didn't even bother to try to define the term upon which his essay is built, nor has anyone had success in conventionally defining the term "free verse." The point I make in The Book of Forms (q.v. bibliography) is that "poetry" is a genre, with fiction, drama, and the various nonfiction genres (autobiography, travelogue, epistles, journalism, and so forth), whereas "verse" is a mode, like prose, and, again, any of the genres may be written in either of the modes. We are victims of the traditional Anglo-American cultural bias that poetry must be written in verse or it isn't poetry (the terms "verse" and "poetry" are often confused), and that bias clouds our judgment just as it clouded that of the French, forcing them to come up with definitions that transform prose modes into verse modes — hence vers libre / "free verse," which is clearly a contradiction in terms: how can "verse" be "free" if it must (according to dictionary denotations) be "metrical"?
Anyone who reads the Bible can tell that prose poems have existed from the beginnings of history. Anyone can prove by scanning (if one knows how to scan: see "the Rules of Scansion" in The Book of Forms, Third Edition) nearly any piece of English prose that it consists primarily of iambic and anapestic rhythms, not meters, for Whitman was not counting syllables in his prose poems, though the parallel grammatical structures of his prosody certainly did provide repeating rhythms, as The Book of Forms discusses. We know when Whitman was writing metrical poems, which he did early in his career and when he wrote "O Captain, My Captain," because the verse lines are apparent on the page, and one can count the strict lengths of the accentual-syllabic verses. This brings up another point: the mere act of scanning prose does not turn that prose into verse. Verse is verse only by virtue of the fact that the maker of the verses counted the syllables, stresses, and/or verse feet in discrete lines.
Why do traditionalists insist that poetry in English must be written in some sort of "verse" or it isn't poetry? And why do they have to justify line-phrased prose as verse? The answer is simple: given the former bias, the latter is a requirement if prose works are to be allowed into the poetic canon. Perhaps if we plow a few rows with everyone's exemplar, Walt Whitman, we can illuminate this discussion of "lineation" and "verses." As I type I have beside me several editions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Let's here set down the first few "lines" of that "poem," together with the poet's own line counts, first from the edition of 1855:
[1]
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to
you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of
summer grass. 5
[2]
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes....the
shelves are crowded
with
perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and
like it,
the distillation would intoxicate me also, but I
shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume....it has no taste
of the
distillation....it
is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever....I am in love with it, 10
I will go to the bank by the wood and become
undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
Now, what are the "lines" of this passage? Where, for instance, does line 6 end, with the word "crowded" or with "perfumes"? If with the former, then Whitman's "line 10" is really line 12. What caused Whitman (who was his own printer) to curl line six over? Why, right-hand justification, of course, just as though it were prose. The page wasn't wide enough to print the clause all in one line. Can this be proven? Certainly. Here is line six of the same poem (only now titled "Walt Whitman") from the third edition (1860-61):
Houses
and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves
are crowded with perfumes,...
Why does the "line" now break after "shelves" rather than after "crowded"? Because the pages are narrower in this edition, therefore the right-hand justification required that this prose sentence break elsewhere. Here is the same passage from the edition of 1900:
Houses
and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are
crowded with perfumes,...
Francis Murphy's edition of The Complete Poems breaks this passage of the protean poem in the same place, but now it is line 14, as it is in some of the other editions published during Whitman's life.
What constitutes the Whitmanian "line," then, at least in the poet's own view? Clauses, generally independent clauses. Meter has nothing to do with it, nor has "versification" of any known kind. Line one is an independent clause; so are lines two and three and all the rest of the lines of this passage. They are linked independent clauses in parallel constructions. One can see the parallelism by running one's eye down the left-hand margin of the poem.
Now, if we scan the "Song of Myself," what will we find? We will find iambs and anapests randomly, except where the parallels require that the same rhythms appear in approximately the same order. This is not versifying; these are not meters. Although "lineation" is taking place, it is not typographical "lineation" but grammatical lineation. If we want Whitman's prose poem to look even more like a "traditional" verse-mode poem, we may line-phrase it further, in the manner of William Carlos Williams, by breaking the clauses into phrases:
I
celebrate myself,
and
what I assume
you
shall assume,
For
every atom
belonging
to me
as good belongs to you.
Have we made this poem any more of a "poem" by doing this? Is it any more "verse" than it was before? Have we hurt the poem or helped it? We have done no more to it than draw attention to it for a specific purpose. By the way, did Whitman use the term "free verse"? Certainly not, as it didn't exist in English at the time. He knew he was writing prose poems.
Until someone else can establish a "convention" for free verse — that is to say, a definition that most users of the English language can agree with, "free verse" will not, in fact, exist except as a confusing term. Despite the fact that we have been using it for most of a century, there is no reason for anyone, at this juncture, to jump on the free verse bandwagon and define it as anything but prose, whether "lineated" or not.
Wallace nevertheless elsewhere in the opening section of his essay continues to treat the term "free verse" as though such a convention actually exists. He writes, "Reading or hearing unmetered verse...we are not aware of any fixed or predictable pattern." Does the term unmetered verse make sense in terms of the OED definition? "In free verse, there will of course be natural patterns and probably significant repetitions of them, but we have no particular sense of predictability or expectation." What does Wallace mean by natural patterns? Is this term the same as his other neologism, "speech-run"?
Wallace also refers to "free verse" as "the predominant verse form in the twentieth century." Is prose a verse form? One had thought that the term referred to such things as sonnets, sestinas, or villanelles. Does he mean that prose has become the predominant mode for writing poetry in the twentieth century? I can agree with that statement, but the "forms" of prose used in modern poetry are the forms of grammatical parallelism (synonymous, synthetic, antithetic, and climactic parallels) to be found in Whitman and the Bible (and in The Book of Forms).
In the early chapters of his book Free Verse Charles O. Hartman (q.v. bibliography) talks about the necessity for "conventions" in poetics and prosodics. He reviews the various prosodies and the inappropriate application of the concept of "isochrony," or musical time, to English poetry. Hartman spends all of his chapter three telling the reader that no one agrees on a definition of "free verse”; then, in chapter four, ignoring what he has just written, Hartman talks about English poetry primarily in terms of isochrony and begins to come up with yet another definition of "free verse" that I for one cannot even understand.
Let me be specific. Hartman writes, "A meter is a prosody whose mode of organization is numerical." Certainly not. A meter is a meter; a prosody is a prosody; to wit: a prosody is any system for writing the genre of poetry (OED); there are verse systems and prose systems: verse and prose are modes. Some examples of verse systems are accentual verse, syllabic verse, and accentual-syllabic verse (although Wallace does not believe that the first two of these exist).
Within these prosodies there are various specific meters; for instance, within accentual prosody there can be a meter called dipodics; in syllabics, decasyllabics; in accentual-syllabics, anapestic trimeter (Wallace denies that any of these things exist). An example of a prose prosody is grammatic parallelism, as in the Bible.
There are many of Hartman's and Wallace's scansions with which I do not agree, nor do I see how many others could agree with them. For instance, Hartman distinguishes between two lines: "Shivering in their beds in November's wind" and "Shiver in their beds in November's wind." But in fact the two lines scan exactly the same way: "Shiv'ring" is an elision — who, except perhaps for Wallace, who does not believe in elision, either, pronounces it with three syllables? Therefore, "Shiver" is a trochee also, and the line looks like this in both versions: ´x | .x | ´x | x´ | x´ — there are three trochees in the line, so it is trochaic pentameter both ways standing on its own, but in an iambic pentameter poem both lines would be headless iambic — (x)´ | x. | x´ | xx´ | x´ — with a promotion in the second foot and an anapest substitution in the fourth foot.
Hartman scans some Hopkins lines, but in the "dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in (secondary stress by promotion) his riding" sequence he doesn't stress dawn or drawn, even though they are sprung with alliteration and rhyme; he doesn't show the promotion of in, and he doesn't show the stress in riding, which any pronouncing dictionary will indicate. The same is true in the following line, where the un in "underneath" is obviously accented, as is the first syllable of steady. In the next line, "there" takes a rhetorical stress; "how" takes an alliterative stress, and the second syllable of upon is normally stressed. I simply have no idea what Hartman is talking about here in his discussion of Hopkins' prosody.
Hartman's scansion of Morris' poem is equally baffling to me. No matter how one pronounces "Gradually," whether with four syllables or three (a w-glide elision on dua), one of the normally unstressed syllables in "...dually in the" is going to be promoted — I hear it on the y. Ditto in the following line: one of the syllables in "That are out..." must be promoted if they are all normally unstressed, but in fact out in "outlasting" takes a primary stress, according to my dictionary, which also shows that the dis in "disappear" takes a primary stress. The reader may check any pronouncing dictionary to confirm these assertions.
At the beginning of chapter three Hartman asks, "Why is poetry usually written in verse?" It isn't. If he had said "English language" poetry, the question might have been appropriate, but the poetries of many cultures are, and always have been, written in prose, which was the first mode for poetry beginning with Gilgamesh and continuing through the "Song of Songs" and the Psalms. In English Christopher Smart, William Blake, Martin Farquhar Tupper and Edgar Allan Poe wrote prose poetry before Whitman did. Even Euphues is more poem than novel.
Hartman wrote further, "Though isochronous prosody only marginally belongs to poetry — its natural home is in song — the lines of distinction are not always easy to draw. " *** "...Once words give up the rhythmic support of music...the temporal prosody becomes one of two meters. In a stress-oriented language [like English], it becomes accentual meter." Hartman goes on then to mis-scan the Morris poem mentioned earlier and to discuss accentual meter, but five pages later he talks as though isochrony were applicable to English, which it is not, as he himself had just finished pointing out.
On page 64 Hartman talked about "counterpoint between accentual isochrony and lineation," which sounded as though it might be an interesting idea, but he discussed it in terms of some lines from W. C. Williams' "The Dance." Hartman maintained that the first and last lines, which are identical, "In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess," "...is so clearly a line."
But it isn't! Without a gloss, how does the ordinary reader pronounce "Kermess," with the stress on the first syllable?
In Breughel's great picture, '' The Kermess
or on the second?
In Breughel's great picture, '' The Kermess
Hartman gives no scansion, and a standard dictionary is of no help. If the word is pronounced the first way, then it is a stich of Anglo-Saxon prosody with the caesura out of place, and it's a poor line for that reason; if it is pronounced the second way it scans x´ | x´ | ´x |.x |´ (x), starting out iambically and shifting to trochees, and it's still a bad line rhythmically. The "tweedle of bagpipes" line is a good line, but it's also obviously a perfect line of Anglo-Saxon prosody, including alliteration, and that's why we like it, not because it is "anacrustic" and so forth, as Hartman maintains.
At least here Hartman is talking about "counterpoint" as something rhythmical. I understand the term to mean more specifically variations, including substitutions, in an accentual-syllabic poem, as I have written in The Book of Forms. One has also heard of "eye counterpoint," which is spatial — I was the first to use this term, I believe, as applied to verse, and Hartman uses it as well although he, like others — including the so-called "New Formalists" and Wallace — doesn't cite, or even mention, any edition of The Book of Forms, which was first published in 1968, long before Hartman's book, or any neoformalist volume, was published. "Eye counterpoint" has to do with the placement of lines on the page, and perhaps Hartman was trying to work the two ideas together somehow, but he wrote, "These shifting relations between syntax [my emphasis] and linear isochrony constitute the poem's prosody." That is opaque for these reasons:
1) Hartman had earlier said that isochrony is not really applicable to accentual or accentual-syllabic prosody.
2) He had talked about "counterpoint" in terms of meter, and perhaps worked it along to a consideration of something like "eye-counterpoint" in his discussion of "lineation," a term out of art, not out of literature, according to the OED. Here, however, Hartman is getting into matters of sentence structure as well. By the time the reader reaches page 72 Hartman has left the concept of counterpoint as a rhythmic device well behind and he is talking about "the counterpoint of lineation and syntax alone."
By
the time we have arrived at this point Hartman has completely lost me and, I am
sure, nearly everyone who cares about verse writing or even prosodics. Hartman is nowhere near establishing a
"convention" regarding "free verse," nor even a reasonable
definition of it. Wallace in his
essay attempts a finesse by not trying to establish a definition but simply
acting as though one exists. My
own definition has the advantage of simplicity and is easily defended: verse is
metered language, and prose is unmetered language. The OED
definition of these terms is the same.
WORKS CITED
David Baker, editor, Meter in English, A Critical Engagement, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997
Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse, Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1980.
Lewis Turco, The Book
of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics,
Lebanon NH: University Press of New England, 2000.
——. The Public Poet, Ashland: Ashland Poetry Press, 1991.
Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy, New York: Penguin, 1975.
——. Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley, London: Secker and Warburg, 1959.
——. Leaves of Grass, Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860-61.
——. Leaves of Grass, Philadelphia: David McKay, 1900.
REMARKS
Excellent essay, Lew!
I've printed it out to read again, more slowly and carefully. Thanks!
Love,
Rhina
Lewis,
Enjoyed reading this on your site. I tend to put the term 'free verse' in quotation marks when using it. Maybe now just I'll stop saying it altogether. I must say that 'accentual-syllabic' is still a mystery for me; I thought I understood it clearly until I read Mary Kinzie's version of it. What do you think of her Poet's Guide? It seems to me an odd mixture of the simplistic and the abstruse! (Besides having a great many typos.) But there is much that is helpful.
Marta
Finch
Marta,
I haven’t seen Ms. Kinzie’s material. Why do you need anything else if you own The Book of Forms? There’s nothing hard about “accentual-syllabic” prosody. The poet counts, first, all the syllables in the line; then he or she counts the stressed syllables in the line, and finally the poet counts the verse feet in the line. In a perfect line of iambic pentameter verse there will be, first, ten syllables in the line; second, there will be five stressed syllables in the line, and these will alternate regularly with the unstressed syllables, the line beginning with an unstressed syllable, which will yield, third, five iambic verse feet. Of course, there should be variations of one kind or another in the line, but iambs must predominate; that is to say, the iamb must be the running foot, and very few lines should be perfect.
Lew
Lew,
Thanks, that was fast! But you very kindly explained the part I knew. Of course I have read and re-read your book's explanation, and here you make it seem very simple. But it isn't. What throws me is when there are 13 syllables in a line and it can only properly be scanned as pentameter; or, conversely, when a line of only 9 (or even 8) syllables must be. If a 10-syllable line has 6 strong stresses, is it still a pentameter line? And is that what makes it accentual-syllabic? Or is it what I would have thought — just a poor line? (Yes, I know it depends on the poet/poem, but could it be accentual hexameter?) I'll look for some examples in the next few days and send them to you to perhaps clarify what I'm trying to say.
Marta
Marta,
I described a PERFECT line of iambic pentameter verse. But I also said, "Of course, there should be variations of one kind or another in the line, but iambs must predominate; that is to say, the iamb must be the running foot, and very few lines should be perfect." So in any iambic pentameter line as variations there may be up to two other kinds of feet. If you substitute two three-syllable feet, say two anapests for two iambs, the syllable count will be twelve, not ten, but iambs will still PREDOMINATE, and it will still be an iambic pentameter line, though with two variations. If your line contains thirteen syllables, it's not likely to be an iambic line because there will be three variations, and odd feet will predominate. Similarly, the only way that an iambic pentameter line can contain six stressed syllables is by substituting a spondee for an iamb, which one can do in the first foot (very unlikely anywhere else). Contrarily, if one drops an unaccented syllable somewhere, most likely in the first foot (a "headless" line), the syllable count will be nine, not ten, but it will still be an iambic line, and what is most important is that there be five verse feet in the line. ALL THIS IS IN The Book of Forms, Third Edition on pages 37-43.
Lew
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