“Apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables...”

On Blank Verse

When I try my hand at free verse, I’m a drowning man in stormy seas. Blank verse, by contrast, I know how to write—or anyway, I have that confidence that is an imperfect indicator of knowledge. It’s ironic, to be sure—why should free verse, where there are no rules, be harder than blank verse, the rules of which still elude the experts?

But my relative abilities are just one reason why American Independence in Verse is mostly in blank verse. The other is subject matter. Blank verse is the meter of Henry V at Agincourt; it’s the meter of Satan in hell, resolved “to wage by force or guile eternal war.” It’s the obvious choice for the rebellion that founded America.

If whole books have been written in blank verse, few have been written about it. Robert Shaw observes that his book Blank Verse: A Guide to its History and Use, published in 2007, is the first such book in over one hundred years. The book is great, because an initial segment of the book is great. Shaw explains how blank verse took its first shaky steps, how Marlowe and Shakespeare set it free, and how Milton honed it to perfection. It’s a story of discovering a new tool, and delighting in its wide range of uses.

But in the aftermath of Milton’s achievement, there are really only four events in the history of blank verse that deserve mention. First and second, are the innovations of Wordsworth and then Frost. Milton fused blank verse, the meter, with an epic and elevated diction. Wordsworth pulled them apart, and created a “conversational” blank verse that embraced “ordinary vocabulary and an avoidance of the ornate.”

That’s what Wordsworth thought, anyway. Today his poetry doesn’t sound all that conversational. But Wordsworth should be judged on how far he came, not how far he had left to go. It was Robert Frost who was the true devotee of conversational blank verse, willing to forgo all traces of “elevation” in his style:

You can get enough of those sentence tones that suggest grandeur and sweetness everywhere in poetry. What bothers people in my blank verse is that I have tried to see what I could do with boasting tones and quizzical tones and shrugging tones...and forty eleven other tones. All I care a cent for is to catch sentence tones that haven’t been brought to book.

Some in fact thought Frost went too far, so over-valuing a fidelity to gruff New England speech rhythms that his poetry crossed the line into free verse.

The third event is T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound more or less killing blank verse, and metric verse generally, as a living tradition in English poetry. (“Too penty,” Pound-as-editor would write to Eliot, in the margins of a draft of The Waste Land.) The fourth is metric poetry’s long-simmering and ongoing revival.

But after Shaw’s discussion of Eliot, more than a hundred pages of his book remain. What is the rest about? Not blank verse, the form, I don’t think. He’s already said all there is to say, about the form’s flexibility and its limits. The balance of the book, instead, is an examination of too many individual blank verse poems, many of which Shaw does not think are very good.

A book on the “history and use” of blank verse should say what blank verse is. On this subject Shaw is content to say little, and nothing new. Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter; but what is iambic pentameter? Those who come to Shaw for guidance on writing in this meter will come away frustrated. He gives the classic and useless advice: write in a rhythm that matches the template

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

—but not too closely. Perfect match is sing-songy; stray too far, and you’re writing free verse. But as to judging when you’ve gone too far, you’re on your own.

This conception of iambic pentameter is a horse that will not die, at least not outside Linguistics departments. I’ve beat it enough already. I’ll pause here to discuss one example.

Yeats’ famous poem “The Second Coming” ends like this:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

“The final line is problematic,” Shaw tells us. One scansion (marking of stresses, and division into feet) that he offers is this one (marks may be mis-aligned in email; click the title above to open this in a browser):

    /       x             /         /          x      /      x   x      /
[Slou-ches] [toward Beth-] [le-hem] [to be born]?

This makes the line “a nine-syllable [and four-foot] line combining disparate feet: trochee, spondee, iamb, anapest.” Since the “ideal” line of blank verse is (on this way of thinking) ten syllables / five iambs, the line appears quite deviant. (Reminder: an iamb is “da-DUM”; a spondee is “DUM DUM”; and an anapest is “da da DUM.”) But the appearance of great deviance is due to a false model of normality. On a better model of iambic pentameter, the line has just one, common deviation from the norm. To use the better model, first “match” the line to the template “W S W S W S W S W S” (W=weak, S=strong), and forget about dividing the line into feet:

  W      S        W         S    W   S     W  S   W   S
Slou-ches toward Beth-le-hem [Ø] to be born?

The core norm of iambic pentameter, on this approach, is that the most stressed syllable of any polysyllabic word should match to an S position (unless that syllable starts a line or phrase). Yeats’ line obeys this norm! (“Beth” in “Bethlehem” matches to an S.) Where the line deviates is with respect to another norm: that each position in the template should be occupied by some syllable in the line. Here, the seventh position (a W) is unoccupied (as marked by the [Ø].) So the line is only mildly deviant, and is not, as Shaw suggests, holding onto the meter by a very thin thread.

What’s more, this kind of deviation is nothing new. Back when blank verse was a strapping young man just coming into his strength, Shakespeare wrote “broken-backed” pentameters—those that lacked a weak syllable:

     W      S    W   S   W     S      W  S   W     S   
Struck Cae-sar on the neck. [Ø] O you flatterers!    (Julius Caesar)

    W  S  W     S      W     S   W  S   W    S
Horr-i-ble sight! [Ø]  Now I see ‘tis true     (Macbeth)

And one innovation of Hopkins’ sprung rhythm was to make freer use of unoccupied W positions than earlier poets had. (Strangely, in his grand tour of variants on strict pentameter, Shaw never mentions this one.)

But I was talking about American Independence in Verse. It’s maybe ironic that a book of poems about the American Revolution should be so conservative in its meter. On the other hand, some of the genres the book renders in blank verse are unattested in Shaw’s survey. Among others, the form is used for: court depositions; propaganda; and newspaper opinion pieces / treatises in political philosophy. Of course there are also grand and rousing speeches.

Up top I bemoaned my frustrations with free verse. I did, however, find free verse necessary and fitting for one revolutionary in the book. Fitting, because while

...most Patriots preferred to see 
Harmonious relations soon restored;
All memory of recent animosity
Obliterated; and a return to life
Secure in the warm shadow of the mother country,

he was not. The first man to advocate for America’s freedom from Britain deserved to say so in lines free from meter.

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American Independence in Verse will be published November 4, and is now available for pre-order.