Is free verse really poetry?

No

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by Joshua Jones

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Free verse or metered verse? This is one of the great literary quandaries of our time. Ever since Walt Whitman wrote his ground breaking "Leaves of Grass", free verse has inched its way to stardom and dominance over metered poetry. Is this advance positive or negative and does it constitute real poetry at all? And can we really quantify poetry as one form or the other?

First we will define the two.

Usually free verse poetry is defined by any poem which forsakes regular meter and rhyme (not that it cannot use either of those in portions) and prides itself in its choice of words and natural rhythmic flow that mimics natural speech. Free verse has its grounds in Romanticism which gave way to Transcendentalism which gave us Walt Whitman who gave us what we know as free verse. The roots of free verse have given it a special bond with nature poetry and flow. This, coupled with its freedom from meter, has given rise to its name. The uses of free verse are limited to poetic purposes and rarely leaks into drama because free verse is rarely quantifiable or in rhetorical form. However, modern poets have adopted this "new" form as their own.

Metered verse, on the other hand, has a definite meter (as is evident), which is, the technical correspondence of sounds and beats as to the number and emphasis of syllables. This type of poetry, in the English, was given its life by a many differing influences; these influences include the old French language that was introduced as a result of William the conqueror, the Latin influence of the medieval times, and the original Anglo-Saxon speech that dominated early history for England. Popularized and arguably invented by Chaucer, metered poets include Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Wilde, Poe, and Longfellow- just to name a few. This style more than often makes use of rhyme, though it is not always necessary (as in blank verse). Metered verse is versatile and is often used in theater.

Now which type of poetry is the best? First we must know what poetry is, by the book. This is more easily said than done seeing that poets have been unable to agree on one definition of poetry for centuries. Everyone seems to know what poetry is, but his neighbor believes the opposite. For example, if we say that it is the use of words in a way that is audibly pleasing and mentally and emotionally provoking, we can say that many things are poetry, which would tend to favor free verse poetry. But then what do we say is audibly pleasing? In my opinion, feeble though it may be, the whimsical, patternless meanderings of free verse leave something lacking. Historically poetry, in all languages, has been characterized by form; Dante wrote in terza rima, Homer wrote in hexameters, Beowulf was written in the traditional sylabic anglo-saxon form, and Sappho wrote odes (in the traditional sense of the word).

I know it is an unpopular opinion to say that free verse is not poetry, but I, none the less, maintain it. Modern poets have thrown off the confines of meter and rhyme and have let their poetry be "free". This has only enslaved them to mediocre poetry. They say that meter places boundaries on their art. But what other arts have done this. Say a painter said, "This canvass is holding me back", or suppose that the dancer said, "My body cannot express this dance correctly, let me be rid of it". This would be absurd in both cases; the painter cannot paint without supplies, and the dancer cannot dance without her body. How then can poets write without meter? In essence free verse has stemmed from laziness and an inability to write in meter. This is not to say that free verse is not art; it is merely a different form of art, making it no less noble.

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