Free Verse Vs Blank Verse
One of my favourite words in English is 'misnomer', which means an inaccurate name for something.
An example is 'fish pie', which isn't really a 'pie' in the traditional sense of the word (there's no pastry crust), and the filling frequently includes other types of seafood additional to fish.
Another 1 would be 'the Commonwealth of Nations', which is a geopolitical association of 54 sovereign states formerly nether British dominion. Given that this grouping includes countries with vastly unlike GDP/GDP per capita levels (e.g. Republic of ghana and Canada), the term 'commonwealth' can inappreciably be taken literally.
In poetry assay, an of import misnomer is 'blank poetry', which has ever been a favourite amidst the 'Great' English poets. Much of Shakespeare's plays were written in bare verse; Milton's ballsy Paradise Lost is also in blank poetry; Tennyson, Browning, Wordsworth et al were all fans of blank verse. Simply there'south nothing 'blank' – as in empty or boring – about blank verse, which is why the term itself doesn't practise much to aid the states empathize what it is.
What is blank verse, and why were the 'Greats' all over it?
The almost straightforward definition of 'blank poesy' is unrhymed iambic pentameter.
More than specifically, it is a poetic form which does not follow a rhyme scheme, only adopts a set meter (usually iambic pentameter). According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Verse and Poetics –
Blank poesy is a term for unrhymed lines of poetry, always in lines of a length considered advisable to serious topics and frequently in the most elevated, canonical meter in a given national prosody.
In English language prosody, this "about elevated, canonical meter" is none other than iambic pentameter, which has been the go-to meter for such "serious topics" as the relationship between man and God (Paradise Lost), the follies of overreaching ambition (Macbeth), the connection between humanity and nature (The Prelude) etc.
What lends bare poesy its dignified stature is two-fold: on the 1 hand, it isn't subject to rigid constraints of sonic regularity; equally, it retains a measure of steadiness in menses which makes it an appropriate vehicle for notions of stateliness and solemnity.
While 'bare' poetry doesn't take much to exercise with blankness, 'free poetry' is closer to what it purports to exist – it refers to verse that'southward gratuitous from all prosodic prescriptions.
While bare verse is unrhymed just metrical, gratis verse is unrhymed and unmetrical , which makes it the closest verse grade to prose. The line between free verse and prose, while thin, is defined, and is usually adamant by the presence of lineation (so spoken gratis verse may be a scrap harder to distinguish from a prose passage).
A whistle-terminate tour of the history of blank verse
Unlike bare verse, which has a longer, more illustrious history dating back to the Italian and English Renaissance, free poesy is a considerably more modern form. At the very least, it didn't proceeds traction as an actual prosodic type until the tardily 19th century, when the French Symbolists began to use vers libre as an arroyo to stylistic experimentation.
The Anglosphere soon caught on, and come early on 20th century, the Modernists made free poesy the 'new cool' and attributed all sorts of ideological virtues to shunning rhyme and meter. While there were those in the advanced camp who initiated a wholesale rejection of prosodic form, other Modernist poets like T. Southward. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence were more than reserved in their attitude towards a poetics entirely removed from tradition and structure.
As Eliot writes in his essay 'Reflections on vers libre', by advocating free poesy, poets aren't necessarily lodging "a campaign against rhyme", merely making the first step to modernizing poetry by breaking away from rigid schemes and conventions –
"… 'Blank verse' is the only accepted rhymeless verse in English – the inevitable iambic pentameter. The English language ear is (or was) more sensitive to the music of the poetry and less dependent upon the recurrence of identical sounds in this metre than in any other. There is no campaign against rhyme. But information technology is possible that excessive devotion to rhyme has thickened the modern ear. The rejection of rhyme is not a leap at facility; on the reverse, it imposes a much severer strain upon the language. When the comforting echo of rhyme is removed, success or failure in the choice of words, in the sentence structure, in the club, is at once more credible. Rhyme removed, the poet is at once held upwardly to the standards of prose. Rhyme removed, much ethereal music leaps up from the word, music which has hitherto chirped unnoticed in the expanse of prose…"
Broadly speaking, then, the popularity of the bare verse picked up steam with Shakespeare and Milton'south endorsements, only to wane at the cusp of the 20th century, when formal and stylistic experimentation became the literary mission du jour. Post-WWII, though, we've seen both bare and free poetry adopted past poets across the lath, which should adjure to the timeliness and flexibility of these forms.
Seeing as I've already written about the bare verse of British writers like Shakespeare, Milton, Browning and Wordsworth, as well as the free verse of T. S. Eliot (albeit always with a dissimilar or wider emphasis), I figured that in this post, nosotros could wait at Irish and American poets instead – W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore.
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Reading the blank verse of W. B. Yeats' 'The 2d Coming': "the eye cannot concord"
Today, Yeats is largely known every bit a poet, only he was in fact a man of many personas.
He was a lifelong Irish nationalist, a theatre owner, an ardent playwright, a fervent occultist, a Nobel Prize winner – and above all, a great poet.
Part of his entreatment lies in the various, and often, conflicting, facets of his character, but the chasms he embodied brand him the fascinating, transitional figure that he is. Yeats was too a man of contradictions: he saw himself as Irish to the last, only had lived in London for more than 40 years; he was influenced by modernist Poundian aesthetics in drama, simply had rejected much of the stylistic 'glass-breaking' championed by Pound (and to a lesser extent, Eliot) in his poetry; he believed in mystical, occultist ideas that had little basis in science or reality, and yet he often reached for existent humans and material things every bit the master subject field of his works.
As someone who had lived through a concatenation of crises – from World War I (1914-1919), the Spanish Flu (1918-1920), the Ango-Irish War (1919-1921), then the Irish Civil War (1922-1923) and the social collapse that came with information technology all, Yeats nonetheless held fast to a sense of optimism, which is reflected (I call back) in his famous poem 'The Second Coming'.
According to Factiva, 'The 2nd Coming' was the almost quoted poem in 2016, a yr when populism and terrorism reared their ugly heads in worrying means, from Trump's election to Brexit to the bombings in Iraq, Syria, Brussels etc. It'south besides a poem that has long made its manner into the cultural allusive fabric, with Chinua Achebe's 1958 postcolonial novel Things Fall Autonomously and Joan Didion's 1968 essay drove Slouching towards Bethlehem being famous examples.
The irony, nevertheless, is that most people tend to just quote the first stanza of Yeats' poem – the pessimistic office, without noticing that the second stanza offers – for all its dark imagery – a glimmer of hope. Granted, this 'hope' isn't of the cheeriest diversity, as Yeats' thought is that there will exist redemption after an apocalypse – merely the apocalypse must first make it for the slate to be wiped make clean again for rebirth.
This distinction betwixt apocalyptic grimness in the beginning stanza and postal service-apocalyptic anticipation in the 2nd stanza is largely reinforced by Yeats' use of blank poetry. While the first stanza is completely in bare poetry, the rest of the verse form diverges from this course at points.
The beginning stanza in 'The Second Coming' (lines ane-7)
In the first stanza, notation that each line contains 10 syllables –
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot concord;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all confidence, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The reference to "the widening gyre" needs a fleck of explaining here: Yeats believed that history followed certain patterns created by the constant interplay of micro actions and macro conditions, and one of these patterns was the "gyre" – a spiralling vortex. All historical events accept place in this "curlicue", which contains a gravitational force that is supposed to concord things together.
And yet, placed at the crossroads of big-scale state of war and mass homo suffering, Yeats saw the dawn of the 20th century every bit a sign of full disintegration, which is why the "whorl" is "widening" in its disobedience of unity, leading to what is probably the most frequently-quoted line in this poem – "Things autumn apart; the heart cannot hold".
The tension between content and grade is obvious here: what'due south described is a world in bedlam, just the disarray is framed inside the structural integrity of blank poetry, as it turns out one iambic unit subsequently some other in a five-by-five pentameter sequence (although a example could be made for the first line being a combination of dactylic and anapestic units, equally in –
TUR-ning and TUR-ning in the WI-de-ning Ringlet;
(\ u u \ u u u \ u u \)
… which sets us up with the expectation of change and plummet, despite the semblance of metrical stability that resumes for the rest of stanza one (from lines 2-vii).
This suggests, then, the speaker's desire to hold the unholdable, and that despite the inflow of an engulfing, tragic forcefulness – as evident in the imagery of flooding in "mere anarchy… loosed upon the earth/The claret-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned", information technology is necessary to project a sense of composure, even if such sophistication comes in little more than than a hollowed-out shell.
In the face of anarchy unleashed, misplaced 'convictions' and extreme passions, maintaining a dignified front end is perhaps the one last stand against complete devastation.
The second stanza in 'The Second Coming' (lines 8-21)
With the pivot into the second stanza, the speaker alludes to "the Second Coming". In the premillennialist eschatology, Christ returns to the World before the Millennium, which is a literal one thousand-year peace age as prophesied in the Book of Revelation. But at that place'due south a sarcastic border to this innuendo, which the emphatic adverb "surely" gives away –
Surely some revelation is at manus;
Surely the Second Coming is at mitt.
The Second Coming!
Throughout history, we've seen many prophets declare the imminence of such 'Second Comings', but so far, none has materialised. This impulse to concord out on the false hope of deliverance is and so debunked by "a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi" which "troubles my [the speaker's] sight" –
The Second Coming! Inappreciably are those words out (one actress syllable – hypercatalectic)
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi (2 extra syllables – hexameter)
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert (three extra syllables – hypercatalectic hexameter)
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, (three actress syllables)
A gaze blank and pitiless equally the dominicus,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all almost it (one extra syllable – hypercatalectic)
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. (1 extra syllable – hypercatalectic)
The darkness drops once again;
With the ascent of this sphinx-like figure, the speaker realises that the 'Second Coming' he'south witnessing brings neither redemption nor relief.
Instead, with its "gaze blank and pitiless", it attracts more signs of gloom, more than reminders of death – those "shadows", desert vultures, and the "darkness" that descends.
Detect, as well, that this section in the poem departs from the stately bare verse tempo nosotros've seen in the first stanza, when the lid remains, as information technology were, placed on the pressure cooker of pandemonium. Information technology'south certainly interesting that lines 11, 12 and 13 contain 11, 12 and 13 syllables respectively (contra the 10 syllables of the bare verse).
And this metrical accumulation peaks at the indicate of the sphinx's full display. In Greek myth, the sphinx is known for her riddle of "which animal has ane phonation, and becomes 4-footed, ii-footed so 3-footed?" The respond, of course, is man, and in the context of this poem, the implication may be that whatever hope of deliverance lies first in the human earth, only time and once more, we see man letting itself down with cycles of brutality, violence and mutual destruction.
And then, the metrical divergence perhaps highlights the emotional intensity that the speaker feels upon being met with this overwhelming vision; as, it may be a looking-forwards to the inflow of a once-in-a-century, dissonant year that concludes one historical dispensation and heralds the beginning of some other.
Reading the free verse of Marianne Moore'south 'Poetry': "nosotros practice not adore what we cannot empathise"
Earlier we move onto Marianne Moore'due south meticulous gratuitous poesy, I'd like to share ii other Modernist examples to highlight merely how pliable 'free verse' can exist every bit a prosodic category:
Equally she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for team-drill. I was drawn in by curt gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her pharynx, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pinkish and white checked material over the rusty green iron table, proverb: "If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden …" I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might exist collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this stop.
· 'Hysteria', T. S. Eliot
Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.· '50'art, 1910', Ezra Pound
To near people, neither verse form reflects a conventional agreement of 'poetry' – costless verse or otherwise. Eliot's 'Hysteria' might too be a prose excerpt, and Pound'due south 'L'art' seems more like a momentary exclamation than an actual verse form. Only that, of course, is the whole point of gratis poesy's Modernist renaissance – these poets leveraged the 'freedom' of 'gratuitous poetry' to make an ideological argument nigh the boundaries of literary art, namely that at that place should be little to no boundaries at all.
And nevertheless, when poetry becomes absent of all poetic value, it'due south perhaps off-white to question whether such verse deserves its title, or if information technology fundamentally ceases to be what it claims to be. If the value of a poem lies in its beingness a reservoir of man experience conveyed through creative form, then any attempts at 'formal experimentation' should also be done in service of humanity, not politics.
This, at to the lowest degree, appears to be the bulletin of Moore's aptly titled poem 'Poesy', which reads more like a pamphlet than a verse form, but shows through its skilfully wrought class the possibility of marrying free verse with aesthetic integrity.
The speaker opens by acknowledging, with no less than a sheepish, cocky-reflexive flash, that "I, likewise, dislike it: there are things that are important/beyond all this fiddle.", with the "it" hither referring to the much ado of writing poesy (especially in the Modernist milieu that Moore herself was part of). The sort of densely allusive complimentary poesy that Eliot, Pound et al tended to write seems embarrassing to Moore's speaker, who "reading it… with a perfect contempt", sees poetics for its real value – it is "a place for the genuine", a written compendium of human deportment, feelings, sensations recorded for all time, for all people. In verse, there should be –
Hands that tin grasp, eyes
That tin dilate, hair that tin can rise
If it must, these things are of import not exist-
Cause a
High sounding interpretation can be put upon them
But because they are
Useful; when they become and so derivative as to
become unintelligible, the
Aforementioned thing may be said for all of united states – that we
Exercise not admire what
We cannot understand.
There'southward a dig at literary critics couched within there, as well, when the speaker refers to the "loftier sounding estimation" that'due south often enabled and encouraged by both 'difficult' writers and English professors. As James Joyce once said, his notoriously challenging novel Finnegans Wake (because it is largely unintelligible, densely inventive and thickly allusive) is certain to proceed English academics in business for at least the side by side century. Moore, however, seems to intendance about the idea of poetry (and literature, by extension) being "useful", which doesn't necessarily mean it has to exist instructive or didactic, but more documentative and demotic – both reflective of and attainable to the human psyche.
One of the near interesting features of this verse form is that despite its layman register, its form is elaborately architected – almost in a mocking mode. Nosotros are forced to question if there's anything at all to the ways the lines taper and cascade in varying lengths, and to end short of 'falling into Moore's trap', as it were, when we doubtable that we may exist missing the wood for the trees by focusing too much on the grade at the expense of the statement.
This tension reveals the beauty and danger of free poesy: information technology's a groundbreaking prosodic form because it has expanded the scope of poetic concerns, only on the other hand, it offers the temptation of excessive tampering and frivolous reading, to the extent where perhaps some poets are content to cobble together whatever materials and call the motley a 'gratis verse' verse form –
The bat,
holding on upside downward or in quest of some-
thing to
Eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a whorl,
a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his pare similar a
equus caballus that feels a flea, the base-
brawl fan, the statistician – case after case
Could be cited did
One wish it; nor is it valid
To discriminate against "business documents
and
Schoolhouse-books"; all these phenomena are important.
This is a periodic sentence dragged out through a ragtag of pedestrian observations, implied uninspired characters like "the immovable critic… the baseball fan, the statistician" and the Tolstoyan disdain for "business documents and school-books", only to stop on the concession that "all these phenomena are important". Simply while they bear significance in their respective contexts, whether or not they vest to the sacred realm of poetic imagination is an entirely different discussion (and the speaker's view is no).
As the poem reaches its conclusion, we hear Moore's ain philosophy of poetics declaring itself through firm – at times scathing – words carried beyond winding lines –
One must make a distinction
nonetheless: when dragged into prominence past half
poets,
the event is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats amid us can exist
"literalists of
the imagination" – in a higher place
Insolence and triviality and tin can present
For inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads
in them, shall we accept
It.
This is a clear point delivered in circumlocutory syntax, but the point is, of class, that these "one-half/poets" – cheekily 'severed' by dint of Moore's line suspension – "drag into prominence" things which accept no identify in verse. The 'liberty' of 'free verse' isn't a complimentary-for-all, and just considering someone combines a random item or document with some other random item or document doesn't make it revolutionary or 'experimental' verse. There is a demand, so, for the hoity-toity Modernist ideologues and aesthetes ("the autocrats among us") to recalibrate their view on the balance between content and class, and – contra Yeats – go "literalists of/The imagination", go back to nuts and present in their works what is axiomatic to their creative minds.
In that location is tremendous ripeness in reality for poetic product, and for all the 'revolutionary' zeal that the Modernist pivot from more traditional prosodic forms (similar bare poesy) to free verse, Moore seems to believe that it is "the raw material of poetry in/all its rawness" which gives poems their "genuine", authentic voice. And so the poem ends on a clarion phone call that is probably no less ideological than the views of the ideologues she attacks –
In the meantime, if you lot demand on i hand,
In defiance of their opinion –
The raw material of poetry in
All its rawness, and
that which is on the other paw,
Genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
The greatest irony, then, is that for Moore, while gratuitous verse has enabled the nascence of pseudo-poets – it has also exposed the deviation between the pseudos and the real, authentic champions of verse.
To read my analysis of other poems, check out my posts below:
- What is an ode? Reading Keats' 'Ode on Melancholy' to find out
- Guilt in poesy: Reading Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess' and William Wordsworth'southward 'Extract from The Prelude'
- Freedom in poetry: Reading Sylvia Plath's 'Pheasant' and Ted Hughes' 'Hawk Roosting'
- Comparing love poetry (II): Reading Philip Larkin'south 'Wild Oats' and Carol Ann Duffy's 'Valentine'
Free Verse Vs Blank Verse,
Source: https://hyperbolit.com/2021/04/01/whats-the-difference-between-blank-verse-free-verse/
Posted by: dooleycitage.blogspot.com
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