The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

the recited poem admits the vagaries of
personal and regional reading as valid
prosodic factors; once these are admitted
free verse exists without anyone having to
invent it.
The casting off of metres in favour of
unopposed rhythms – particularly in the
syntax- and cadence-centred prosodies of
Whitman and the Imagists – is an attempt
to fully develop the expressive function of
the latter at the expense of the interpretative
( pace Pound), discriminatory function
of the former. It is also designed to
more fully implicate readers in the poem
as a psychological or emotional event by
withdrawing the substitute sensibility of
an accepted prosody and by compelling
them to create their own speeds, intonation
patterns and emphases. In such verse
a prosody is not to be disengaged from
the linguistic material; in such verse the
line is superseded by the strophe, the line
itself (syntactic unit) becoming the measure,
and variation in line-length the
rhythmic play. What Amy Lowell means
by cadence is a retrospectively perceived
rhythmic totality, an overall balance
rather than the continuously disturbed and
restored balance of regular verse.
Ironically the need to do away with
rhyme as a worn out convention coincided
with the need to retain it as an inherent
part of the psychology of creation,
the new ‘Muse Association-des-Idées’
Free verse 95
(Valéry). Rhyme becomes the crucial
ad-libbing mechanism, suited to capturing
the miscellaneousness of modernity.
The irregular rhyme of free verse is a
structuring rather than structural device
and is a better guide to the tempo of
memory, emotion, etc. than variation in
line-length, which has no fixed relation
to reading speed. Besides, with rhyme
removed, a poem may be deprived of
much of its magnetic compulsiveness;
because nothing is anticipated, nothing is
looked for. Without this inbuilt momentum,
the free verse poet has often to fall
back on the syntactic momentum of
enjambment or the momentum of rhetoric
(Whitman, D. H. Lawrence) and the concomitant
dangers of overintensification
and monotony of tone and intonation; the
poet’s energies may be too much concentrated
on the mere sustaining of impetus,
rather than on using language to explore
mental states etc. In this sense at least,
rhyme is liberating.
See T. S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on vers
libre’ (1917) in To Criticize the Critic
(1965); G. Hough, ‘Free verse’ in Image
and Experience (1960); C. O. Hartman,
Free Verse (1980); D. Wesling, ‘The
prosodies of free verse’ in R. A. Brower
(ed.), Twentieth Century Literature in
Retrospect (1971); Chris Beyers, A History
of Free Verse (2001).
CS