On Free Verse, with Applications to Walt Whitman

Part 1: Robert Bridges Hated Free Verse

Robert Bridges was Poet Laureate when he made his case against free verse. Published as “A Paper on Free Verse”—not the most poetic title—the year was 1922: the year, ironically or not, of “The Waste Land.” Bridges was swimming against the tide, or a tidal wave. How strong was his stroke?

Bridges first asks what free verse is. The name suggests it’s defined in the negative: free verse is poetry not bound by the rules of meter. But there must be more to it than that; free verse must have “some positive quality...by which it will be distinguishable from prose.” From then-current theorists Bridges takes the idea that “free verse must be rhythmical.” This, however, presents a paradox: dictionaries say that rhythm is a repeated pattern; how then is rhythm possible without meter? It seems that, to write free verse, one must flirt with the regular rhythm of metric verse, but always shy away, never show the ring, never consummate. Free verse is not really free; the poet “has cast off his visible chains but has not escaped into liberty.” In a funny but (to me) opaque moment, Bridges calls the discipline of free verse “a sort of protestantism.”

In fact, Bridges asserts, “a great deal of ‘free verse’ has been easily analyzed into the disguise of old forms.” Writing good non-metric poetry is harder than it seems, for efforts to make a line good, often makes it metric, whatever the poet’s intentions. Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, that radical break with metric tradition that pre-dates Pound and Eliot by more than half a century, begins thus:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume

These, the opening lines of a famous piece of free verse are—in iambic pentameter. (The second is a “headless” line, missing the initial weak syllable—certainly allowed, if used more by Chaucer than Shakespeare.)

Of course true free verse, verse that is not iambic pentameter flying under the radar, does exist. Bridges argues that, inevitably, it must

renounce certain...advantages of the metrical system, the value of which is so great that it is difficult to believe that they can have been duly appreciated by the men who would cast them contemptuously away.

Ironically, one advantage lost is a naturalness that free verse was supposed to finally make possible:

Free verse as defined cannot be written without the appearance of self-consciousness.

Robert Frost’s goal, and gift, was to write iambic pentameter that sounded like a New England farmer just talking:

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

This conversational tone was not Whitman’s aim; for him, self-consciousness was a feature, not a bug.  But one can see in Whitman’s penchant for long lists, a grasping for a formal feature other than meter to hold the poem together; and list-mania, like other non-metric glues a free verse poet might use, contributes to an appearance of self-consciousness, whether the poet likes it or not:

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine [...]

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.

(Note that at least four of these lines have iambic endings: “the PROmise OF my OWN” etc.)

There’s also the problem of line-endings. When writing pentameter, after 10 or 11 syllables the next line must begin. This locus for aesthetic effects is lost when line endings are free. Bridges supposes that free verse lines will tend to end when grammatical phrases end. This cannot be as strong a tendency as he thinks, but it is a strong tendency in Whitman, and while it seems to work there, Bridges shows that it can also be a disaster: he takes a passage from Paradise Lost, erases Milton’s endings, and re-cuts the lines at phrase boundaries:

Then feed on thoughts,
That voluntary move harmonious numbers;
As the wakeful bird sings darkling,
And in shadiest covert hid tunes her nocturnal note.
Thus with the year seasons return,
But not to me returns day,
Or the sweet approach of ev’n or morn.

The power of the original has been punctured, and entirely deflated:

Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of ev’n or morn.

If Bridges’s critique did not kill free verse in the crib, nor did he want to, but still...

I have myself made so many experiments that I cannot be suspected of wishing to discourage others. No art can flourish that is not alive and growing, and it can only grow by invention of new methods or by discovery of new material. In the art of English verse my own work has led me to think that there is a wide field for exploration in the metrical prosody, and that in carrying on Milton’s inventions in the syllabic verse there is better hope of successful progress than in the technique of free verse as I understand it.

---

See also:

• Timothy Steele against Free Verse;

• Dana Gioia on Metric Poetry;

• Donald Justice on Meter and Memory;

• Poetry as Low-Grade Musical Material.

Coda: it’s not the critic who matters, it’s the one in the arena etc. Poet Laureate, whatever, was Bridges himself any good? Yvor Winters (himself no friend of free verse) thought “Low Barometer” one of Bridges’ best poems:

Low Barometer

The south-wind strengthens to a gale,
Across the moon the clouds fly fast,
The house is smitten as with a flail,
The chimney shudders to the blast.

On such a night, when Air has loosed
Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,
Old terrors then of god or ghost
Creep from their caves to life again;

And Reason kens he herits in
A haunted house. Tenants unknown
Assert their squalid lease of sin
With earlier title than his own.

Unbodied presences, the pack’d
Pollution and remorse of Time,
Slipp’d from oblivion reënact
The horrors of unhouseld crime.

Some men would quell the thing with prayer
Whose sightless footsteps pad the floor,
Whose fearful trespass mounts the stair
Or burts the lock’d forbidden door.

Some have seen corpses long interr'd
Escape from hallowing control,
Pale charnel forms—nay ev’n have heard
The shrilling of a troubled soul,

That wanders till the dawn hath cross’d
The dolorous dark, or Earth hath wound
Closer her storm-spredd cloke, and thrust
The baleful phantoms underground.