For almost 3000 years, from Homer (about 800 B.C.) to about 1900 A.D., poetry was marked by formal elements: poets were conscious of counting something and putting those somethings in patterns. In Greece and Rome it was long and short vowel sounds. In the Renaissance it became accented and unaccented syllables. There were always cultures who used non-countable units as their dominant verse forms. Hebrew poetry, for example, is written in two-line units, with the second line restating or supplementing the first in different ways.
But in the late 19th century, as part of a larger movement called Modernism, poets began, as Ezra Pound put it, “to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, rather than in the sequence of the metronome.” Because free verse was invented in France, it was called verse libre. Typically, density (and its mischievous twin, obscurity) gets more attention in free verse, though I was taught that good poetry is always dense, even when it looks simple. Perhaps the “energy” lost in counting stressed syllables is expended in making the verse more metaphorically dense–making it harder to decipher on a first reading–or in achieving a unique and authoritative “voice,” or in shifting the tone from the elevated rhetorical stance of traditional verse, to something more conversational.
The older forms of verse became known as “formal” verse, or “traditional” verse, or “academic” verse. T.S. Eliot carried free verse to England (not single-handedly), and now it is the dominant mode of versifying, at least among English-speaking poets. Before 1900, amateur poets wrote in traditional forms; since 1900, almost all amateur poets write in free verse, which seems easier to do, though as Eliot warned, “no verse is really libre for poets who want to do their job.” Certainly, bad poetry can be written in either mode. Bad poetry in traditional forms is called doggerel, and there are lots of oddities and cross-overs. We have gifted writers of doggerel, like Mohammed Ali, and we have Emily Dickinson, who wrote dense verse in a loose traditional ballad meter (stressed 4,3,4,3), which is why you can sing most of them to the tune of “Hernando’s Hideaway.”
People (like me) who write verse regularly, as a discipline or as therapy or as a pass-time or as an obsession –or some combination of those–sometimes hesitate between the modes, or alternate between them. Neither mode feels quite natural, and I sometimes feel vaguely frustrated by having both modes available.
I had always assumed that Modernist poets like Berryman and Lowell wrote free verse, because the rhyme and meter are not obvious and because the meaning (and even the subject) of their poems is often hard to grasp on a first reading. John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” are usually held to be among the least accessible of modern poems. So, when I found that Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” was in eight-line stanza unobtrusively rhymed, I was fascinated. And when I found that each of the hundreds of Dream Songs had three stanzas, each of six lines, again rhymed unobtrusively, I was ecstatic. I had l already begun to suspect Lowell of rhyming (as in “Skunk Hour”), and when I began to look for it, it’s all over the place.
Here is seems, is a way to have it all, or to have the best of both worlds. I don’t know if it will change the way I write. Probably at the age of 82, we write the way we write. But it has changed the way I read and the way I think about poetry. Certainly, it has given me a new perspective on John Berryman.
georgeslanger 