Sherry Chandler

Form and discovery

from Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse. An Essay on Prosody (Northwestern University Press, 1980):

Robert Bridges saw all forms as balancing convention with discovery. That the writer of free verse can count on obtaining certain effects by the use of certain rhythmic devices, he argued, “implied that they are what other ears are prepared to accept, and such effects can only be the primary movements of rhythm upon which all verse has always depended” [from "A Paper or Free Verse," North American Review, 216 (Nov. 1922), 547-58]. “What other ears are prepared to accept” is conventional. But “the primary movements of rhythm” must have been discovered somewhere in the poetic material or in the human ear or soul or nervous system. Pound claimed that the sonnet exemplified such a discovery. It “occurred automatically when some chap got stuck in the effort to make a canzone. His ‘genius’ consisted in the recognition of the fact that he had come to the end of his subject matter” [from Literary Essays, New Directions, 1968]. Even near the revolutionary beginning (1918), Pound acknowledged that a traditional meter could sometimes be the “absolute rhythm” he sought for each poem. He believed “that most symmetrical [i.e., metrical] forms have certain uses [although] a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms” [Literary Essays]. It was a question of choosing among available alternatives, not of bowing to the dictates of any convention that could not accommodate the particular character of the individal poem.

Free verse simply presented the most radical alternative, and many poets chose not to avail themselves of it. …Yeat’s “No Second Troy” is not a sonnet, not because it lacks two lines, but because his subject did not accord with the movement implied by the sonnet form. …In “Leda and the Swan,” the accord did exist—though the poem also extended the possibilities of the sonnet. The thrust and return of its thought, its movement from concrete action to meditation on the action called for the sonnet form, as the steady accumulation of impassioned questions in “No Second Troy” did not. …Finally, I would argue that the writing of metrical verse was generally improved by the whole atmosphere of new and experimental attention to form.

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