Open forms or free verse - Jon Stallworthy

At the opposite end of the formal scale from the fixed forms (or, as they are sometimes called, closed forms) of sonnet, villanelle, and sestina, we come to what was long known as free verse, poetry that makes little or no use of traditional rhyme and meter. The term is misleading, however, suggesting to some less thoughtful champions of open forms (as free-verse structures are now increasingly called) a false analogy with political freedom as opposed to slavery, and suggesting to traditionalist opponents the disorder or anarchy implied by Frost´s in/famous remark that “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” There has been much unprofitable debate in this century over the relative merits and “relevance” of closed and open forms, unprofitable because, as will be clear to any reader … good poems continue to be written in both. It would be foolish to wish that Larking wrote like Whitman, or Atwood like Dickinson. Poets must find voices and forms appropriate to their voices. When, around 1760, Smart chose an open form for “Jubilate Agno”, the incantatory catalogue of the attributes of his cat Jeoffry proclaimed its descent from the King James translation of the Old Testament and, specifically, such parallel cadences as those of Psalm 150:

Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary:
praise him in the firmament of his power.
Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him
according to his excellent greatness.
Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise
him with the psaltery and harp.

These rhythms and rhetorical repetitions, audible also in Blake´s Prophetic Books, resurfaced in the work of the nineteenth-century founder of American poetry, as we know it today. Whitman´s elegy for an unknown soldier, “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night”, may end with a traditional image of the rising sun, like Milton´s “Lycidas”, but its cadences are those of the Old Testament be read as a boy:

And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his
grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,
Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field
dim,
Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth
responding,)
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day
brighten´d,
I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his
blanket,
And buried him where he fell.

Whitman´s breakaway from the prevailing poetic forms of his time was truly revolutionary, but certain traditional technique he would use for special effect: the concealed well/fell rhyme that gives his elegy its closing chord, for example…

The poetic revolution that Whitman initiated was continued by Pound, who wrote of his predecessor:

It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.

Pound, the carver, unlike Whitman, the pioneer, came to open forms by way of closed forms, a progression reflected in the first four sections of Pound´s partly autobiographical portrait of the artist, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”. Each section is less “literary,” less formal than the last, quatrains with two rhymes yielding to quatrains with one rhyme and, in section IV, to Whitmanesque free verse. A similar progression from the mastery of closed forms to the mastery of open forms can be seen in the development of such other poets as Lawrence, Eliot, Lowell, and Rich.

Pound may have called himself a carver, but he, too, proved a pioneer, opening up terrain that has been more profitably mined by his successors than the highlands, the rolling cadences explored by Smart, Blake, and Whitman. Pound recovered for poets territory then inhabited only by novelists, the low ground of everyday speech, a private rather than a public language. He was aided by Williams, who, in such a poem as “The Red Wheelbarrow”, used the simplest cadences of common speech to reveal the extraordinary nature of “ordinary” things:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Each line depends upon the next to complete it, indicating, the inter-dependence of things in the poem and, by extension, in the world, “The Red Wheelbarrow” bears out the truth of America´s statement that in free verse “you need an infallible ear to determine where the lines should end.”

Some poets have ventured even further into the no man´s land between prose and poetry with prose poems. Hill´s “Mercian Hymns” may look like prose, but the poet insists that his lines are to be printed exactly as they appear (on the book)… and the reader´s ear will detect musical cadences no less linked and flowing than in good free verse. Eye and ear together… are never more dramatically engaged than in the reading of such shaped poems as Herbert´s “Easter Wings” and Hollander´s “Swan and Shadow”.

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JON STALLWORTHY.
An excerpt of his “Essay on Versification” (The Norton Poetry Anthology, 1983)