Yes

by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: October 27, 2008   Last Updated: April 16, 2012

To say that free verse is not poetry is to say that Walt Whitman, the father of American free verse, was not a poet but merely wrote prose with odd line breaks and lots of repetition.  The terms verse and poetry are synonymous, Verse is defined as "Metrical composition, form, or structure; metrical language or speech, poetry." The term verse has wider application than does poetry. It may refer to a single line of a longer poem, a number of lines or a stanza of a poem or song. or a sequence of lines in music leading to a chorus or separating one chorus from another.

Mistaken notions about free verse and blank verse are commonplace. Blank verse is distinct from free verse.  English blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. In French poetry, it also includes unrhymed six-accent verse; however, such twelve-syllable lines - known as Alexandrines - are rarely found in English poetry. Alexander Pope spoofed the 12-syllable line thus in An Essay on Criticism:

A needless Alexandrine ends the song
That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

Pope's first line has five accents making it iambic pentameter: da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM. The second line has six accented syllables with a central pause or caesura. It can be scanned variously, but most of us hear da DUM da DUM da DUM, DUM da DUM DUM da DUM. The image of the wounded snake and the words "slow length" reinforce the extra long line visually and aurally.

Free verse has irregular cadence and lacks traditional stanza form. Just as blank verse has variations and substitutions of non-iambic feet to lend emphasis or prevent singsong regularity, free verse often has interior rhyme, fortuitous end-rhyme, alliteration, and all the other terms of figurative language.

Finally, the statement that all poetry must have meter excludes all concrete poetry and the innovations of literary figures like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D., all of whom found the formal verse of the Victorian period stilted and employed the tones and cadences of spoken language. All poetry - rhymed, metrical, and free - must have structure. Line breaks evoke voice and tone. Writers of free verse are conscious of the cadences and rhythms, and precise word selection

Observe the following examples to illustrate the distinctions made above. The preceding sentence, just like this one, is prose and makes no pretense of doing more than imparting information. It could have been phrased: "One hopes today to clarify some points about what differentiates these truths." The words following the colon could be separated into two iambic pentameter lines.

One hopes today to clarify some points
About what differentiates these truths.

Readers of poetry will recognize sentences consisting of iambic feet - unaccented syllables followed by accented ones. But is it something that could bear the exalted title of poetry. The simple statement of intention does not pack any added meaning or intensity.

Free Verse

As an example of free verse, look at a brief poem by Walt Whitman, the first American to use this genre extensively. The opening line doubles as the poem's title.

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars

Note there is no meter or end rhyme. Instead the poet begins the first four lines with "When" clauses. This is a conscious artistic device not heard in ordinary speech, and it reinforces the notion of the poet having become "sick and tired" and overwhelmed by the catalog of rational proofs. And so to seek relief he rises and glides off to be by himself under the stars.

Compressed into  Whitman's eight lines are a variety of feelings and attitudes that would be difficult to express in a full page of prose. The speaker/poet thrills to the mystery of the universe, not to the dullness of data, charts, proofs, and columns of figures. He prizes man's individuality and is stifled by the crowded lecture halls. He prefers silence to applause, star-lit darkness to lighted classrooms, movement to sitting. Perfection lies for him not in mathematical complexity and scientific knowledge but in imaginative response to and harmony with nature. There is a bit of punning in his use of the word "unaccountable", after all of the counting and higher mathematics in the astronomer's speech. Also his use of "mystical" to describe "moist night-air" suggests religion, which runs counter to dispassionate scientific rationality. In short, this is a poem and a work of art to be read, reread, and pondered.

Blank Verse

There is no necessity to do more than give examples to demonstrate that this term is not interchangeable with free verse. It refers, as stated earlier, to unrhymed lines of verse in which iambic pentameter predominates. Shakespeare's plays are mostly blank verse, but they also contain prose as well as rhymed couplets and even a sonnet imbedded here and there.

Robert Frost once  described unrhymed verse as "playing tennis with the net down." Frost preferred traditional forms but detested the stilted artificiality that often accompanies them. His poetry is proof that ordinary language can resonate with substance and grandeur. This blank verse sample is the beginning of Frost's "Birches." 

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.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice after a sunny morning
After a rain.

The first four lines are perfect iambic pentameter. Metrical substitutions commence with the repeated accents of "ice storms do" and the first syllable of "Often."

Often people think and claim that they have written free verse merely because they have used haphazard line breaks and created odd shapes. Such stuff is not poetry.

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