Angeline
Poet Chick
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2002
- Posts
- 27,332
How free is your free verse?
Are your lines primarily end-stopped? Do they end on a strong stressed syllable and/or have punctuation or a clear pause to the next line giving them a naturally sentence-like syntax?
Here's Ezra Pound end-stopping:
__________And all that day
Nicea moved before me
And the cold grey air troubled her not
For all her naked beauty, but not the tropic skin,
And the long slender feet lit on the curb's marge
And her moving height went before me,
__________We alone having being
And all that day, another day:
___________Thin husks I had known as men,
Dry casques of departed locusts
____________speaking a shell of speech. . .
Propped between chairs and tables. . .
Words like the locust-shells, moved by no inner being;
___________A dryness calling for death.
(Excerpted from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley)
See how each line has a sense of complete thought with puntuation or a pause, even when they enjamb with an unstressed word on at the start of the following line (like "and")? It gives the poem an orderliness and a measured pace.
~~~~
Perhaps your lines are more often parsed, that is giving the appearence of sentence-like syntax but not necessarily containing complete syntactic thought. They can stand on their own or be enjambed but the enjambed line usually starts with an iamb or other weak beginning.
Here is some parsed syntax from William Carlos Williams' Pastoral:
The old man who goes about
Gathering dog lime
Walks in the gutter
Without looking up
And his tread
is more majestic than
That of the Episcopal minister
Approaching the pulpit
Of a Sunday.
Meanwhile
The little sparrows
Hop ingenuously
About the pavement
Quarreling
Over those things
That interest them
With sharp voices
But we who are wiser
Shut ourselves in
On either hand
And no one knows
whether we think good
Or evil.
__________These things
Astonish me beyond words!
This was written rather early in Williams' life as a poet. The syntax suggests complete thoughts but takes a longer time to deliver them than the poem with end-stopped lines did. And the enjambment usually leads to a weak, unstressed syllable or word so you are forced to read in an even (albeit somewhat unnatural), plodding way. It's kind of fussy and boring if it goes on too long (as it does here imo). And it ends with the poet having to tell you how to react instead of building the astonishment into the poem for you to feel as you read.
~~~~~
Or are your lines more annotated? Do you enjamb and then force a strong syllable or word onto the beginning of the following line, which makes the reader pause there? When you do this you are in effect rushing them through one line and walloping them with an emphasis or pause at the beginning of the next line.
Annotated lines offer most potential for experimentation in free verse, but they've has been around a long time. When the free verse folk at the beginning of the 20th century (mainly Pound and the Imagists) were looking to break out of metered formulaic lines, they saw this older way of writing a line (in Dante, Cavalcanti and Milton, for example) as a return to Classicism.
Look at these lines from Milton's Paradise Lost. The poet is explaining the concept of conscience to Satan:
__________wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse.
The first line seems complete but is not and moves into a line beginning with a weak word which pushes the stress onto What, which is then echoed across the line. The line seems to be a statement in and of itself, but then moves again to a strong word at the start of the third line (the only word on the line in this case) and the reader is forced to emphasize "worse" and view the preceding line in a new and different context. Here, the enjambment gives the reader at least two possible meanings.
When William Carlos Williams figured out how to use this annotated style in his poems what we think of as his distinct voice emerged. He's taking a "classic" way of constructing lines from earlier poets and adapting it to his version of free verse.
His poem Spring and All, which is basically the same theme as Pastoral, moves completely away from parsed lines and look what a difference it makes:
The sunlight in a
yellow plaque upon the
varnished floor
is full of a song
inflated to
fifty pounds pressure
at the faucet of
June that rings
the triangle of the air
pulling at the
anemones in
Persephone's cow pasture--
When from among
The steel rocks leaps
J.P.M.
who enjoyed
extraordinary privileges
among virginity
to solve the core
of whirling flywheels
by cutting
the Gordian knot
with a Veronese or
perhaps a Rubens--
And so it comes
to motor cars--
which is the son
leaving off the g
of sunlight and grass--
Impossible
to say, impossible
to underestimate--
wind, earthquakes in
Manchuria, a
partridge
from dry leaves
In this poem he doesn't have to tell you he's astonished (like he did in Pastoral) because you feel it yourself in those last four strophes.
There are so many variations to these three ways of ending lines. Read The Fish by Marianne Moore. She has a free verse pattern that uses parsed and annotated lines in a distinctive way.
But what about you? What do you do with your lines? Do you think about them in these ways at all? Which of the three styles appeals to you or is there another way you prefer?
You can create your own free verse forms, in a sense, by varying these types of line endings (and line beginnings) in patterns or no pattern. But you can control it , and in fact you should control your lines. Your poems will thank you for it.
Wait! There's a poll! Everyone loves a poll!
*Ideas from James Unterbach's Art of the Poetic Line.
Are your lines primarily end-stopped? Do they end on a strong stressed syllable and/or have punctuation or a clear pause to the next line giving them a naturally sentence-like syntax?
Here's Ezra Pound end-stopping:
__________And all that day
Nicea moved before me
And the cold grey air troubled her not
For all her naked beauty, but not the tropic skin,
And the long slender feet lit on the curb's marge
And her moving height went before me,
__________We alone having being
And all that day, another day:
___________Thin husks I had known as men,
Dry casques of departed locusts
____________speaking a shell of speech. . .
Propped between chairs and tables. . .
Words like the locust-shells, moved by no inner being;
___________A dryness calling for death.
(Excerpted from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley)
See how each line has a sense of complete thought with puntuation or a pause, even when they enjamb with an unstressed word on at the start of the following line (like "and")? It gives the poem an orderliness and a measured pace.
~~~~
Perhaps your lines are more often parsed, that is giving the appearence of sentence-like syntax but not necessarily containing complete syntactic thought. They can stand on their own or be enjambed but the enjambed line usually starts with an iamb or other weak beginning.
Here is some parsed syntax from William Carlos Williams' Pastoral:
The old man who goes about
Gathering dog lime
Walks in the gutter
Without looking up
And his tread
is more majestic than
That of the Episcopal minister
Approaching the pulpit
Of a Sunday.
Meanwhile
The little sparrows
Hop ingenuously
About the pavement
Quarreling
Over those things
That interest them
With sharp voices
But we who are wiser
Shut ourselves in
On either hand
And no one knows
whether we think good
Or evil.
__________These things
Astonish me beyond words!
This was written rather early in Williams' life as a poet. The syntax suggests complete thoughts but takes a longer time to deliver them than the poem with end-stopped lines did. And the enjambment usually leads to a weak, unstressed syllable or word so you are forced to read in an even (albeit somewhat unnatural), plodding way. It's kind of fussy and boring if it goes on too long (as it does here imo). And it ends with the poet having to tell you how to react instead of building the astonishment into the poem for you to feel as you read.
~~~~~
Or are your lines more annotated? Do you enjamb and then force a strong syllable or word onto the beginning of the following line, which makes the reader pause there? When you do this you are in effect rushing them through one line and walloping them with an emphasis or pause at the beginning of the next line.
Annotated lines offer most potential for experimentation in free verse, but they've has been around a long time. When the free verse folk at the beginning of the 20th century (mainly Pound and the Imagists) were looking to break out of metered formulaic lines, they saw this older way of writing a line (in Dante, Cavalcanti and Milton, for example) as a return to Classicism.
Look at these lines from Milton's Paradise Lost. The poet is explaining the concept of conscience to Satan:
__________wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse.
The first line seems complete but is not and moves into a line beginning with a weak word which pushes the stress onto What, which is then echoed across the line. The line seems to be a statement in and of itself, but then moves again to a strong word at the start of the third line (the only word on the line in this case) and the reader is forced to emphasize "worse" and view the preceding line in a new and different context. Here, the enjambment gives the reader at least two possible meanings.
When William Carlos Williams figured out how to use this annotated style in his poems what we think of as his distinct voice emerged. He's taking a "classic" way of constructing lines from earlier poets and adapting it to his version of free verse.
His poem Spring and All, which is basically the same theme as Pastoral, moves completely away from parsed lines and look what a difference it makes:
The sunlight in a
yellow plaque upon the
varnished floor
is full of a song
inflated to
fifty pounds pressure
at the faucet of
June that rings
the triangle of the air
pulling at the
anemones in
Persephone's cow pasture--
When from among
The steel rocks leaps
J.P.M.
who enjoyed
extraordinary privileges
among virginity
to solve the core
of whirling flywheels
by cutting
the Gordian knot
with a Veronese or
perhaps a Rubens--
And so it comes
to motor cars--
which is the son
leaving off the g
of sunlight and grass--
Impossible
to say, impossible
to underestimate--
wind, earthquakes in
Manchuria, a
partridge
from dry leaves
In this poem he doesn't have to tell you he's astonished (like he did in Pastoral) because you feel it yourself in those last four strophes.
There are so many variations to these three ways of ending lines. Read The Fish by Marianne Moore. She has a free verse pattern that uses parsed and annotated lines in a distinctive way.
But what about you? What do you do with your lines? Do you think about them in these ways at all? Which of the three styles appeals to you or is there another way you prefer?
You can create your own free verse forms, in a sense, by varying these types of line endings (and line beginnings) in patterns or no pattern. But you can control it , and in fact you should control your lines. Your poems will thank you for it.
Wait! There's a poll! Everyone loves a poll!
*Ideas from James Unterbach's Art of the Poetic Line.
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