Sherry Chandler » More form and discovery
More form and discovery
From Charles O. Hartman. Free Verse. An Essay in Prosody (Northwestern Univ Press, 1980):
Where does the poet discover his form? Despite the rhetoric of spontaneity in some free verse, all forms are to some degree received. Invention—the poet’s side of discover—means finding, not creating out of nothing. Still, one can distinguish forms whose invention emphasizes their resemblance to past poetry, and forms which are presented as arising out of a context of speech. …The theory of organic or discovered form implies an impulse toward individualism or personal authenticity. But in moving from Coleridge through Whitman and Williams, one sees the realm of discovery expanding to include not only the content of a specific poem (”the properties of the material”) and the poet’s individual imagination, but the whole culture that supplies his language. The differences between English and American idioms begin to be noticed and insisted on at about the same time free verse comes into prominence.
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