ESSAYS
MARK O'CONNOR
The Perils Of Free Verse
Last year’s Watermark Literary Muster of environmental writing offered an unusual panel session titled ‘The Shape of Poetry or Chopped up Prose – Can the Line Length be Justified?’
At this session we free verse poets found ourselves not quite under attack, yet subjected to rigorous questioning about our standards. Much of the questioning came from Eric Rolls. His high standards as a stylist and environmentalist precluded misunderstanding. He was not seeking to reinstate the kind of bush verse in which insistent regular rhythms yank the hearer’s attention toward the climactic rhymes like a dog heading for a lamppost, nor indeed was he necessarily arguing for a return to rhymed verse; yet he was questioning the effectiveness of much contemporary verse.
The resulting debate was not as unrelated to the Muster’s theme as it might seem. Poetry helps fuel the environmental movement and environmental magazines and newsletters carry surprising amounts of it. Much is somewhat amateurish (although some of Judith Wright’s finest poems first appeared in environmental magazines); but I find it interesting that most of what they print is free verse. In fact free verse poetry seems to be many people’s instinctive way of organising strong feelings about the natural world.
Yet free verse, we know, has a problem with audience. It seems that large sections of the reading public gave up reading poetry about the time that free verse displaced rhymed verse as the norm in English. This lack of public taste for poetry is not necessarily the case in other cultures. As the linguist (and novelist) Anthony Burgess pointed out in his book Language Made Plain, a cultural difference that English-speakers sometimes need to be reminded of is that ‘most foreigners are fond of poetry’. In Australia, despite the relatively high profile of poets like Judith Wright, Bruce Dawe and Les Murray, our literature remains half-crippled in terms of audience. Hence Rolls’s query: whether a tightening of standards in free verse might help restore poetry’s prestige – and even its effect on environmental politics.
His criticisms were treated more respectfully than I think would have been the case twenty years ago. Only one panellist argued that his ‘freedom’ in free verse was absolute, and therefore he could brook no talk of standards. Free verse, for much of its hundred-year history as a major form in English, has worn the protective cloak of novelty. To prefer it was a matter of self-respect, a proof that one was contemporary, fast-moving, modern. In debates on it, positions quickly hardened into a confrontation between ‘fashion-followers’ and ‘old-timers’.
Yet perhaps both sides were wrong. The old-timers/old-rhymesters were wrong in refusing to see that there was a huge problem with the old metres; and the free-versers were wrong in assuming that their new form would become as popular as the old ones once people got used to it. They also failed to offer the public an intelligent explanation of what had changed to render the old metres, which had long provided so much aesthetic satisfaction to so many, not permissible. They often relied on vague appeals to the Zeitgeist, claiming that the definitive clang of rhymed verse was unacceptable in an age of uncertainty. Such an argument is at best half true. After all, perhaps half of all older verse did not rhyme at all, but was ‘blank verse’ (unrhymed iambic pentameter) as used by Shakespeare, Milton, and most of the great nineteenth-century poets.
The real reason the old metres don’t work is, I think, less philosophical and more technical. We may now at last – nearly a century into the free verse era of English – be free to talk about that reason.
Anyone who knows the history of languages should realise that languages tend, every few centuries, to change their dominant verse forms. Latin for instance began with metres based on an iambic stress rhythm (without rhyme), then switched in the classical period to a quite different type of verse that ignored stress but took note of patterns of long and short syllables. Then in the medieval period (when few clerks remembered which syllables had been long or short in classical Latin) Latin poetry returned to various stress rhythms – plus rhyme.
Gaudeamus igitur!Such changes are partly determined by the underlying (slowly changing) sound patterns of a language. No amount of admiration for classical Greek verse (which was based on long and short syllables) would have let the classical Latin poets switch to similar metres if their own language had not possessed the same peculiarity of being divisible into long and short syllables. Conversely no amount of admiration for Greek and Latin verse has ever produced very satisfactory verse based on dividing English syllables into long and short.
So let’s set out the basics. A metre or verse-form is any regular or somewhat regular pattern of sound effects that a poet sets out to create, and that readers come to expect and enjoy. In English, metre is usually a pattern of stress accents (rhythm) with or without rhymes.
The dominant metre of a language can change over the centuries, yet a given language at a particular time often has one dominant metre which the reader tends to look for. The poet can then either gratify, or partly gratify and partly tease this expectation.
English poetry went through a metrical crisis in the early twentieth century. By then the best-known metre had been, for over three centuries, the iambic pentameter or ten-syllable duple rhythm. This was a line of about ten syllables in which the stress tended to fall on alternate syllables:
The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown
That caused the eldest son of Heav’nly Ops
To thrust his doting father from his chair…
A peculiarity of this metre is that it is so simple that it needs to be ‘broken’, thus creating the first step towards free verse. Since a series of perfectly regular pentameter lines would sound artificial and boring, poets writing in English have long allowed themselves a number of irregularities or ‘licences’. For instance, one very common licence is to invert the first two syllables, so that the line starts off with a strong stress. Eg:
Down the assembly line they roll and pass.
Another is to pretend that an unstressed even-numbered syllable is stressed, provided the syllables on either side of it are unstressed. Eg:
That evening I had dinner with a man.
Conversely a quite strongly stressed syllable can be regarded as ‘un-stressed’ provided the syllable after it is at least as strongly stressed. Eg:
Now is the winter of our discontent.
In fact this line uses all three licences.
Of course experienced poets do not use such irregularities quite at random. They use them to slow or speed up a line and to capture the particular tone or emphasis they want. Eg:
Now slowly through the show-room’s flattering glare
or
He ordered coffee. She did not refuse.
or even
Once on a silver and green day, rich to remember.
From the late sixteenth to the late nineteenth century, the iambic pentameter was the main metre of English poetry. It was both the workhorse and the showhorse, and was used for everything from light verse to the most serious tragedies. It sometimes occurred, as in Shakespeare’s plays, without rhymes on the end (blank verse – not to be confused with free verse). But it also worked very well in rhymed stanzas and sonnets.
By the late nineteenth century, poets like Whitman and Hardy, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, had realised that the iambic pentameter no longer fitted spoken language as it had in the past. They began to loosen it towards various kinds of verse in which it is difficult to find a regular rhythm. Rhyme, too, tended to disappear, since the combination of regular rhymes with an irregular rhythm tends to give a faltering or doggerel effect.
Yet some poets found that rhyme could still be used with lines whose rhythm was fairly irregular, provided the rhymes were not too predictable, emphatic, or end-stopped. David Campbell is one of the masters of this technique. Like WB Yeats, he often prefers half rhymes to full rhymes, and uses them to achieve a haunting lyric effect.
But others found ways to loosen the iambic metre much further. Some vary the length of the lines at will, or take licence to put two unstressed syllables in place of an unstressed one at any point in the line, as in Bruce Beaver’s
In the garden, pausing to sniff at the flowers, I said.
An additional licence is that after a pause in the middle of a line the poet may seem to lose count, and start with, say, a stressed syllable when in fact an unstressed one was due. When all these licences are heavily used, as in much of Murray or Beaver, we get a verse that is almost ‘free’ but still has the ghost of the old iambic pentameter behind it.
I would need a book, not an article, to describe the many different kinds of free and semi-free verse forms contemporary poets have invented, and the way such forms, or quasi-forms, can interact with an individual poet’s voice. Yet the ghost most frequently found inhabiting free verse is still that of the previously dominant iambic metre. In fact one of the things that tends to make free verse a ‘weak’ form (in terms of its ability to please a broad audience) is that much of it can only be fully appreciated by distinctly literary readers. That is, by readers too sophisticated to demand the old iambic metre yet so steeped in that same iambic metre that they can still hear it – even when it’s almost not there.
The foregoing historical summary leaves a big question unanswered. Why should poets be content with the mere ghost of an iambic metrical pattern when they could have the real thing – especially if the choice of free verse is punished by a drop in audience size? What is it that makes the old metres unacceptable to most highbrow poets today (or should we risk arrogance and say, to most poets with a good ear)? Let me suggest a linguistic explanation that may cover the facts.
The old iambic metre depended on two assumptions about the English language: first, that any English word could be divided into a given number of syllables; and second, that the language offered roughly equal numbers of stressed and unstressed syllables. This may once have been fairly true. But over the centuries English borrowed so many long words from the Latin languages and from Greek that it was forced to slur many syllables and to have far more unstressed than stressed syllables. (For instance, how do you normally pronounce ‘generally’, ‘comfortable’, ‘biodegradable’, ‘speedometer’?) This made the iambic rhythm seem artificial.
In fact spoken English has a strong tendency to solve this problem by reducing long Latinate words to English-style two-syllable ones that fit easily into the iambic rhythm. Thus Latin episcopus was slurred by stages to modern English bishop. Such a process may depend on spelling adapting to changes in pronunciation. Yet once the fast evolving spelling of English was fixed and ‘fossilised’ by the seventeenth century printers, there was no easy way to remove those extra syllables.
Thus many basic English words like ‘January’, ‘February’, ‘usually’, ‘regularly’, are trapped in limbo between their original four- or five-syllable forms and the two-syllable or three-syllable forms to which they are commonly reduced in rapid speech (‘Jan’ry’, ‘Feb’ry’, etc). Yet without reliable counting of syllables there can be no very satisfactory iambic rhythm. As well, modern English has far more unstressed syllables than stressed ones.
The obvious solution to the second part of the problem would be to abandon the iambic or duple rhythm and use the anapaestic or triple one in which there are two unstressed syllables to each stressed one. Unfortunately, regular triple metre creates a singsong feeling that is best suited to comic verse or to poems about galloping horses (eg ‘I sprang to the stirrup and Joris and he./ I galloped, Dirk galloped, we galloped all three...’).
In practice, what many free verse poets do is to mix triple rhythms into a semi-regular duple rhythm. Luckily, this does not give a metre that is halfway to the anapaestic gallop. More often it gives a measured, variable pace, like that which Spanish poets call ‘the rhythm of a horse walking’ – a rhythm in which there is certainly a pattern and a recurrence, but not one that can be specified by any simple formula. In fact there can be great skill in alternating the lighter triple and the heavier duple rhythms according to meaning. With this clue, some poems that seem to be free verse will turn out to scan with some regularity. Not that the poet need have thought it out like that. Most free verse poets simply have an ear for what sounds right. Similarly, the experienced reader may unconsciously decide within a few words of the start of a free verse poem whether there is any point in looking for an underlying duple or triple rhythm.
If the above is a satisfying explanation of what has happened, and also a way to keep out the dust of irrelevant rhetoric about ‘freedom’ versus ‘restriction’, we may at last be able to ask a practical question related to Eric Rolls’s concerns: how can free verse best be used?
One answer might be that free verse is one of those wondrously capacious forms, like the novel, into which almost any content of thoughts or feelings can be stuffed. A battered, perhaps shapeless, but capacious leather bag.
Oddly enough, this seems to me exactly the wrong view of free verse. (It might be a better description of the iambic pentameter, which, as used by Shakespeare and others, did seem able to carry almost any cargo.) Mention of the novel helps identify the weakness of free verse. The novel can carry such heavy and disparate loads because it offers its readers the enormous satisfaction and compulsion of narrative suspense. Much the same applies to the conspicuous metrical pleasures of Byron’s rhymed stanzas, or even the quieter pleasures of Milton’s or Wordsworth’s unrhymed iambic pentameters. Such forms can carry a large load. Readers need not mind if such poems are long, since there is a substantial pleasure to be found at regular intervals.
By contrast, free verse may offer only the perpetual slight surprise that satisfying poetry offers. This is a pleasure that has more to do with precision and excellence of meaning than with sound – though I do not underestimate for a moment the range of sound effects, particularly subtle varieties of onomatopoeia, that are possible in free verse. But this is a pleasure that the older verse forms offered as well as their metrical pleasures.
In short, free verse is not (as its early apostles too often suggested) an improvement over the verse forms of the past. Because it offers weaker (if less distracting) aural pleasures than the older metres did, it gives a poet less support in holding an audience’s attention, or in creating rich and memorable speech. Perhaps we should say of free verse (as is often said of democracy) that it is the best choice only because the others are worse.
Free verse, I maintain, is at the opposite extreme to ‘capacious’ forms like blank verse. Because the sound effects (quasi-metrical effects) it contracts to produce are lesser, less salient, and more dependent on personal taste and ‘ear’, it is like a light skiff that can carry only light and precisely stowed cargo, though often with superb precision.
Such a ‘weak’ form needs taut writing. Prosy environmental free verse, especially when it is preachy as well, can fairly be called a vehicle with a poor power-to-weight ratio. Free verse, regardless of subject, can rarely tolerate padding. If it cannot offer the old-fashioned metrical satisfactions it needs to compensate the reader with a speed and precision of ideas and images. It is a common – often fatal – mistake to imagine that free verse is a forgiving form into which one can pour loose or narcissistic material. Rather, what we free verse poets must do is to skate with deft speed across the thin ice of our intrinsically ‘weak’ form.
This essay is based on a talk given at the 2005 Watermark Literary Muster
MARK O’CONNOR, born 1945, lives in Canberra. The Olive Tree (his collected poems) was published by Hale and Iremonger. He is the editor of the anthology Two Centuries of Australian Poetry. His website is www.Australianpoet.com/Mark.
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