Free verse definition, Free verse examples, Free Verse Literary terms |
Definition and Examples of Free verse – Literary terms
Free verse:
A type of POETRY that
differs from traditional VERSE FORMS in that it is "free" of the
regular beat of METER, depending instead on the individual poet's sensitivity
to the music of natural speech RHYTHMS. Also, free verse usually lacks RHYME
and often has irregular line lengths and fragmentary SYNTAX. The modern
free-verse movement began in the nineteenth century with Walt Whitman's Leaves
of Grass and the poetry of French SYMBOLISTS Charles Baudelaire and Paul
Verlaine and of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Forerunners of free
verse range from the alliterative verse of the MIDDLE AGES to the Psalms of the
King James Bible to the BLANK VERSE of John Milton and a number of poems by
William Blake and Emily Dickinson.
Although
twentieth-century poetry is predominantly free verse, some poets are more
comfortable working with traditional rhyme and meter. For them, writing free
verse seems, as Robert Frost put it, “like playing tennis with the net
down." For other poets, writing free verse is an opportunity to create
their own rhythmic and visual form. Some free-verse poets invent a new form for
each poem. Others establish a pattern that they use from poem to poem, such as
William Carlos Williams' variable FOOT or Whitman's pause for breath at the end
of each line:
When I heard the learn'd
astronomer,
When the proofs, the
figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the
charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the
astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I
became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding
out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist
night air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect
silence at the stars.
See also:
BLANK VERSE, METER, RHYTHM, SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT.
Tags: Free verse definition, Free verse examples, Free Verse Literary terms
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