Sherry Chandler » We all got rhythm
We all got rhythm
From Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse. An Essay on Prosody, Northwestern Univ Press, 1980:
What is important about free verse is the new insight it gives into the whole question of prosody in any verse. It neither aids nor distracts the reader with an abstract pattern he can transfer in detail from poem to poem and codify in a formally closed, quasi-mathematical system that bears only incidentally on the experience of poetry. Because the reader cannot pretend to account for its rhythms in abstract isolation, free verse confronts him directly with the complex relation of rhythm to meaning. It forces him back into the poem; and that is where he has always belonged. This is the reminder about all poetry that free verse offers to the poet, to the reader, and finally to the student of prosody. (p. 28)
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