According to Poetry Portal, freedom in free verse 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.
Two traditions in free verse poetry run through American and British literature. The first originates in King James 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.
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 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.
Discover Your style of poetry whether you are a writer of poetry or an appreciator and reader of Poetry. See the reading list below.
--e. smith sleigh
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Excellent 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
*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).
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--e. smith sleigh
These Things are a One Thing: http://t.co/11RxN8w
For sale at Amazon: http://amzn.to/ijj6O2