Almost anything today. Free verse poetry is patterned
by speech and images rather than by regular metrical schemes.
Brief introductions: English88
and Electric
Library. Freedom applies not only to freedom from traditional
metre, but freedom to use visual and sound effects as desired
– for surprise, thickening of meaning, symmetry, repetition,
or simply for fun. Lines can also be shortened for speed,
or segmented into clots of words or syllables to slow down
the reading or comprehension.
Who's writing it?
Most contemporary poets – in widely differing
forms. Two traditions in free verse poetry run through American
and British literature. The first originates in The
Bible and Walt
Whitman and comes down through Allen
Ginsberg and Robert
Bly. This is a personal style tending to use asymmetric
and often long lines, parallelism, repetition of words and
phrases, stresses in unexpected places and mixtures of idiom.
The second is more tightly written, with lineation coinciding
with grammatical units (D.H.
Lawrence, Wallace
Stevens and
Carl Sandburg) or not so coinciding (Ezra
Pound, William
Carlos Williams and Robert
Creeley.
Significance of free verse poetry
How poets write often governs what
they can write, and free verse has been a rallying call
in the avant-garde's enlargement of the scope and subject
matter of poetry. Battle continues. The formalists
(e.g. Steele, below) contend that free verse is neither novel
nor liberating. The various factions of the avant-garde often
distinguish
themselves through their free verse styles, or use it to argue
a direction
or not that poetry should now be taking.
Recommend a few books?
Good introductions to free verse poetry are: A History
of Modern Poetry (1987) by David Perkins, Free Verse:
An Essay on Prosody (1980) by Charles Hartman, Missing
Measures (1990) by T. Steele, The Ghost of Meter
by Annie Finch (1993/2000), The
Life of Metrical and Free Verse in Twentieth-Century Poetry
(1997) by Jon Silkin and The
Origins of Free Verse (1998) by H.T Kirby-Smith. Useful
bibliographies follow the American Poetry and Free
Verse entries in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics (1993).
