Humdrum and Harum-Scarum
A Lecture on Free Verse
by Robert Bridges, November 1922
When I was invited last term to discuss some poetical subject before a literary society in my old college in Oxford, it seemed to me that the question of Free Verse would suit the occasion; and having well considered the matter for that select audience, I am now summarizing my discourse as lucidly as I can for a wider public.
First of all it is expedient to get rid of the word Poetry. I shall not discuss the difference between poetry and prose, but merely the distinctive forms of verse and prose. The term Free Verse implies that it is with form that we have to deal, and not with content; and my procedure will be to try to discover the meaning of the term Free Verse, and then show some of the results that must follow from writing in the new or free manner so described or imagined.
One Argument with those terms sometimes takes the following form:
Verse is poetical rhythm;
All imaginative prose is poetical;
It is also rhythmical;
Therefore, all imaginative prose is verse = free verse, Q.E.D.
Though I wish to confine myself to English Free Verse, one cannot treat the subject at all without reference to French vers libre; because in France the revolt against the traditional form is in its threats and promises very similar to our own, and the theory of it has been more intelligently handled and analyzed there than by English critics, the best of whom borrow their reasonings, so far as I can find, from the French. I do not see that we have in England any definite or logical notion of Free Verse distinct from the French, nor that, as far as theory goes, there can really be any difference.
The impulse of the movement is admitted to be a widespread conviction that the old metrical forms and prosodies are exhausted. Thus Mr. Flint, who is well acquainted with the French movement and has long
been keeping us in touch with contemporary French verse, writes in his Other World Cadences one sentence of his creed:
That Rhyme and Meter are artificial and external additions to Poetry, and that as the various changes that can be run upon them were worked out, they grew more and more insipid until they have become
contemptible and encumbering.”
One could not subscribe to this formula without recasting it, but its exaggerations represent, as I take it, merely an emotional quality in the writer’s true conviction.
The word free in “free verse” means escape from something, and that something is the old metrical firms and prosodies. And now having cautiously taken this first step on to solid ground, we shall naturally ask whether, having discarded the old forms, we are to have any new forms, or whether “freedom” is merely the absence of all form.
And since formlessness can have no place in Art, and since any discussion on the nature of free verse implies some form in it, however critics may have failed to define it, we may assume that, besides the negative quality of lacking all the distinctions of metrical verse, there must be some positive quality imagined for it by which it will be distinguishable from prose.
And besides the determination to escape from meter, there is also another point on which all free versifiers agree, namely, that free verse must be rhythmical (conveniently used for eurhythmic), nor does anyone one doubt what is meant by rhythm. Rhythm is in fact difficult to define, but it is easily felt, though the faculty for feeling it varies immensely. Here it is enough to say that it is more than mere movement; it is rather a co-ordination of movements that appeal to the feelings or emotions; and if prose were not rhythmical we should here have the differentiation of verse from prose. But good prose is also rhythmical, so that our question about rhythm must take this form, namely, whether there is any difference between the rhythms of verse and prose, and if so, what that difference is.
Now it would seem clear that the main formal difference between the rhythms of prose and metrical verse was due to the prosody; and since that, being discarded, can no longer serve for a distinction, it will follow that, if there is to be any distinction between the rhythms of prose and fee verse, it must be a more subtle affair.
The main effectual difference between the rhythms of the old metrical verse and of fine prose is, that in the verse you have a greater expectancy of the rhythm; and that comes of the rhythms being more marked and predetermined and confined; and the poet’s art was to vary the expected rhythm as much as he could without disagreeably balking the expectation. This expectancy appears in the critical attitude of the hearer towards the more irregular verses of a poem. In prose this sort or grade of expectancy was absent or even forbidden, and however much the orator’s art led you to welcome the sequence of his phrases, and however satisfied you might be when they disclosed themselves, yet they did not seem predetermined. Thus if a sentence in an old text were deleted you could not supply the lost rhythms in a prose passage so confidently as you might in a poem, where the meter prescribed certain necessities.
Dr. Blass on the Greek orators, with Aristotle and Dionysius, supplies illustration of the Greek practice of hybrid forms.
It follows from this that what is verse to some hearers is prose to others; and since there is no short speech-rhythm in prose which might not be used as a metrical rhythm or a part of some metrical system, the only difference would seem to be that in prose the rhythms were not evident or repeated; if repeated you would come to expect them.
Now if we should take on the one hand some fine passage of English prose, and on the other some fine passage of our old metrical verse, and regard them as typical extremes, it is plain that between their markedly different rhythmical effects—one of which we recognize as prose and the other as verse—a wide field lies in which it is possible to construct something that would be neither the one nor the other. And free verse will be an expatiation of some kind in this field; and it may be claimed, as I think it is imagined, that such an intermediate form may combine some of the advantages of both systems: it might possess in some measure the freedom of prose and the expectancy of the old verse: but we should be prepared to find that in discarding the distinctions which perfected the old types, it lost their most forcible characteristics.
A French writer, to whom I shall return, argues thus: The old poetic verse, he says, marches along by virtue of its common-speech units, the rhythm of which is chosen to enforce or vary the metrical lines. And he contends with Mr. Flint that the beauty of the rhythms lies wholly in the speech-rhythms: they are the essence of the thing, and we do not need the metrical units, which may be regarded, almost historically, as a scaffolding for the building that has been erected, and having now served their purpose, they may be removed and permit the rhythmic building to stand clear.
This is intelligent enough: I wrote myself (in Milton’s Prosody):
“It might be possible, as it is certainly conceivable, to base the whole art of versification on speech-rhythm, and differentiate the prosodies secondarily by their various qualities of effect upon the speech. But no one has ever attempted that.”
And now, quoting myself, I see that I had no right to say that the attempt had never been made, for of course I cannot know, though I am convinced that the task lies beyond our power. But it is plain that the establishment of speech-rhythm as the rule of free verse would, if it should arrive at any rules, be a first step towards such a
fundamental analysis, and we shall now have to examine that step as the theorists have made it.
The French critic, M. Dujardin, whom I have quoted above (Les Premieres Poetes du Vers Libre, in the Mercure de France), has a full knowledge of the subject. He writes with authority and it seems to me with common sense, great ability and sound logic. I shall take his analysis as a basis.
(a) He assumes that one can recognize good prose when one sees it, and that is possible to write a prose poem, i.e. to write “poetry” in prose. But that is not free verse.
(b) He is also in my opinion quite right when he further asserts that the “verses” of the Bible have given rise to a unique impression which, having been consciously and unconsciously copied, has created a distinct recognizable form. And this is a hybrid: it is not free verse.
(c) He recognizes the habit of introducing irregularity into the old metrical forms, i.e. writing the old meters so they do not scan. This, which is common in France, is the commonest kind of incompetent technique in English poets of whatever style at the present time.
The fact that it would be equally true to say that it is impossible to draw the line between prose and verse (as appears throughout this discussion) does not invalidate M. Dujardin’s assumption. No line can be drawn between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but we do not for that reason deny the typical distinction between a lion and an oak tree.
This again is not free verse. (Under this head would fall the Vers Libere of modern French, the Prose Cadencee ou Vers Libres of Moliere, and, I suppose, the blank verse passages of Dickens’s prose.
(d) And to these three I must add a fourth, a form of verse which perhaps is not yet recognized in French though it is common with us, viz. Irregular accentual verse. This is not free verse in the proper sense of that term, because it really conforms, or should conform, to definite metrical laws, which allow indeed any irregularity of length in the line but somewhat confine the rhythms to very various but still definite forms.
M. Dujardin then describes what the elements of the new verse, i.e., rhythm without meter, must logically be. Since the elements of the new verse can no longer be the syllabic feet of the metrical system, they must (he says) be the rhythmic sense-units which are in revolt against them: and so
(a) A line of free verse is a grammatical unit or unity, made of accentual verbal units combining to a rhythmical import, complete in itself and sufficient in itself;
(b) the line may be various in length, and of any length, only not too long;
(c) the line is absolutely indifferent to syllabic numeration or construction apart from its own propriety of sense and pleasant movement;
(d) and being free from all metrical obligations, such as caesura, hiatus, etc., these and all other artifices proper to metrical prosodies are forbidden to it.
The above statement does not seem to me to be open to objection: it is a competent description of the trend of experiments, justifying their successes and discrimination, their inconsistencies and errors. We may provisionally accept it with confidence: but M. Dujardin leaves us after all with no other distinction made between prose and free verse but this, namely, that free verse is made up of short sections or lines which are in themselves accentual and grammatical unities: and it is in this description, which does not fit prose, that we must look to find the distinctive positive quality of free verse.
The independent formal existence of prose is not denied on any hand. Mr. Flint, with whose opinions I hold much in common, and who appears here to be at one with M. Dujardin, distinguishes “prose” from “cadenced prose,” and seems to imply that all cadenced prose is free verse. Thus he says “Cadence should not be printed as prose,” and, as I read him, he notes this undefined term “cadenced” to be the distinction between prose and verse. That, or any other term, would be useful and serve for a name if it were so defined as to distinguish the prose rhythms which without damage can be represented in short sections, from those which cannot: and I should no doubt agree with Mr. Flint. He has not, however, made this distinction clear, and it is the very point at issue, the positive definition which we are seeking.
And if distinction exists it should be easy to demonstrate it by quoting a specimen of good prose and exposing the characteristics; any passage of fine prose should serve. I take one from Bacon:
As if there were sought in knowledge a cowch whereupon to rest a searching and restless sprite; or a tarasse for a wandring and variable minde, to walke up and downe with a fair prospect; or a Tower
of State for a proude minde to raise it selfe upon; or a Fort or commanding ground for strife and contention, or a Shoppe for profite or sale; and not a rich Store-house for the glorie of the Creator and
the reliefe of mans estate.
Or again this:
We see in Needle-works and Embroyderies, it is more pleasing to have a lively work upon a sad and solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy work upon a lightsome ground. Judge therefore of the pleasure of the Heart, by the Pleasure of the Eye.
I assert of these passages that they cannot be printed in short sections as free verse without damage and absurdity. Let the reader try his hand on them.
And certainly much well-written free verse, in which the lines are of varying length and rhythm, is not good prose. However irregular the lines be, they are conscious of their length: they pose with a sort of independence and self-sufficiency: and where the verse is most successful its cadences provoke too much of the expectancy of verse to appear so wholly free from restraint as the best prose can. And it is right enough to call it verse rather than prose. And if it is quite satisfactory—as in short poems it very well may be—it is so by virtue of the poet’s sensibility to rhythmical form, and by his mastery of it; and he will so combine his rhythms that they do create expectancy as they proceed. Indeed I do not doubt that a free-verse poet would regard the pleasure which accompanies this satisfied expectancy, as a note of his success.
Now in so far as this free verse (or cadenced prose) actually creates this expectancy, its rhythms can no doubt be analyzed and reduced to rule. What generally satisfies the ear does so by some principle or law; and the simplest, the commonest and most prevailing conditions will soon be recognized; and they would be the simplest elements of any possible reduction of all verse rhythms to one system. The writer of free verse cannot escape from this: indeed his rejection of meter is based on the recognition of rhythms: he claims for them that they are the fundamental, overruling things. He has cast off his visible chains but has not escaped into liberty. If he is a law unto himself, he is so only by unconscious obligation to a wider law to which he has appealed. But then comes the unavoidable consideration, of what nature are these effects which he is aiming at, and on which he relies? That he can rely on them implies that they are what oether ears are prepared to accept, and such effects can only be the primary movement of rhythm upon which all verse has always depended, and which, on his own assumption, poets have elaborated into the perfected metrical forms which he repudiates.
If ever he become conscious of this, then the purity of his art must appear to him as a sort of protestantism, hampered by negative prescriptions and tabulated prejudices. He will be constantly engaged in deliberately avoiding, reminiscences and in disguising essential similarities. And a great deal of free verse has been easily
analyzed into the disguise of old forms.
It is open to the advocate of free verse to object to all this. He may repudiate expectancy and say it is one of the things that he wishes to be rid of, and that it will not be present in free verse. On my own showing, it would be a subtle and hidden quality, but none the less I doubt not of its cause or effect, and I believe that it is the force
which will hold his free verse together and distinguish it from prose, and I think that free verse is good and theoretically defensible only in so far as it can create expectancy without the old metrical devices. If it fails to effect this, it seems to me but a broken jerky sort of bad prose: and the old fluent prose needs not me nor any one else to defend it from those who would cut it to pieces and call its fragments verse.
But whether or no a free versifier repudiate expectancy, he must renounce certain other advantages of the metrical system, the value of which is so great that it is difficult to believe that they can have been duly appreciated by the men who would cast them contemptuously away.
I will describe as briefly as I can a few of the adverse conditions which must result from rejecting the metrical systems, and for sake of clearness will name four of them thus:
(1) Loss of carrying power.
(2) Self-consciousness.
(3) Same-ness of line structure.
(4) Indetermination of subsidiary “accent.”
First, loss of carrying power. Almost all the power that great poets like Homer and Dante have of poetisizing, whatever they may handle is due to their fixed prosodies. If this should be doubted, suppose the experiment of rewriting their poems so they did not scan. It would of course be mere destruction, and observe, destruction not only of the great immortal lines where the magical concurrence of high diction with metrical form stands out in a clear configuration of beauty that makes them unforgettable and has enshrined them among the treasures of every cultured mind, but the mortar also between the stones, which is now hardly distinguishable from them, would perish and rot away, and would no longer serve to hold the fabric together. A single example will be sufficient: Dante, who was careful to open his cantos effectively, does not scruple to begin the third canto of the Purgatory with a piece of narrative business that Cary, who had no metric skill, represents in his translation by this flat and awkward line:
Then sudden flight had scatter’d o’er the plain,
but the italian is
Avvegnache la subitana fuga
Dispergesse color per la campagna:
and one might almost say that the Divine Comedy does not contain lines of greater dignity. The diction, rhythm, sonority are carried by the versification without a trace of pomposity or affection; and deprived of that resource, free verse must be full of disconsolate patches, for it has no corresponding machinery to carry the subordinate matter.
Second, self-consciousness. It seems very clear to me that free verse as defined cannot be written without the appearance of self-consciousness. The conditions are these: Each line or phrase has to show convincing propriety of diction and rhythm, together with other proprieties of relative length, sonority and poetic value. Now this is frankly impossible; what may conceivably be done in Gaelic, Hindustani or the languages of the Pacific Islanders, I do not know; but English was not made for it and cannot do it. The writer of free verse confronted by a thousand obstacles will, in a poem of any length, whenever his matter lacks poetic content, be at his wit’s end to devise something passable; and his readers or hearers, if they be intelligent, will observe him with amusement, and he himself, being presumably intelligent, will be uncomfortably aware of the situation; for while pretending honest aesthetic rightness he will know that he is only providing an ingenious make-shifts which he would have been glad to avoid.
The happy and not too rare gift of believing that whatever you choose to say must be worth saying, can indeed save a man from self-consciousness, and set his work beneath criticism.
Now this situation is created by free verse; the old metrical system was designed to obviate it, for therein the poet did not choose his form to suit every special turn and item of his matter, but adapted his matter to the exigencies of a prescribed form; and in doing this he found a further reward, because the changes of his matter provoked and justified all the varieties of rhythm that his meter allowed, so that their desirable irregularities came spontaneously, and his metrical form, harmonizing whatever he had to deal with, offered him endless opportunities for unexpected beauties. The meter was like a rich state uniform, robed in which any man will feel equally at ease whether walking in the gaze of a vulgar crowd, or sustaining the delicate dignity of a court ceremony.
Third, same-ness of grammatical line. The identification of the line unit with the grammatical unit must limit the varieties of line-structure. This feature of the free verse is not unlike the common-sense attempt of many modern song-writers to identify their musical phrase with the speech-rhythm of the words. I have made no examination of the practice of writers in this respect, and shall only be theorizing in the following remarks.
The grammatical forms of sentences in English are few, and must repeat themselves again and again; and each form has its proper and natural inflection of voice which, however overlaid, will impose its typical intonation on the sentence. Now if the grammatical forms are made coincident with the lines of the verse, they must impose the recurrence of their similar intonations upon the lines.
It would be easy to quote some passage of free verse which exhibited this kind of monotony, but it would be unfair because it could be matched by similar examples from metrical poems. Indeed the best metrical poetry respects the grammar so strictly that much of it complies fully with M. Dujardin’s rule, and might be quoted as typical free verse, were it not for the negative rule that forbids its meter.
Moreover monotony of this kind is often agreeable in itself, and sought for its special effect. None the less, one of the difficulties in writing good verse of any kind is to escape from the tyranny of these recurrent speech-forms, and the restriction imposed by the rules of free verse must make that difficulty immeasurably greater.
Since the aim and boast of free verse is that it will attain spontaneity and variety, I wonder at myself finding it in danger of self-consciousness and monotony of form.
Fourth, indetermination of subsidiary accent. Metrical verse has the power of determining and relating the subordinate or ambiguous accentuations in a rhythmical phrase; and the essential value of this resource seems to have been disregarded by the advocates of free verse.
A poem in meter has predetermined organic normal scheme for its lines, and whatever their varieties of rhythm no line can be constructed without reference to its form: hence the same syllabic rhythms acquire different values according to their place in the line. The indefinable delicacy of this power over the hidden possibilities of speech is what most invites and rewards the artist in his technique, as the ignorance, neglect or abuse of it makes the chief badness of bad work. Its subtleties mock illustration, but demonstration can be simple or even commonplace. The second book of Paradise Lost opens thus:
High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.
There are two lines of blank verse, but they can be written as twolines of free verse thus:
High on a Throne of Royal State,
Which far outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.
Now in writing and reading them thus, the value of the word “far” is lost. It is seen that the word cannot in itself determine for itself any special value; in the free verse it is flat and dull, and one does not know what to do with it, for if it be unaccented it is useless, and if accented it is foolish. Indeed, no accentuation can restore to it what it has lost.
This one example is enough to show what is intended in this section, but another will lead further, and the passage which I quoted in my Milton’s Prosody, to exhibit how he broke up his lines, will serve well: in Paradise Lost, iii, 37 seq.:
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntarie move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal Note. Thus with the
Year Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn.
These lines are greatly admired; a critic would hardly accuse them of prosaic or dull diction. But now set them out as free verse:
They feed on thoughts,
That voluntarie move harmonious numbers;
As the wakeful Bird sings darkling,
And in shadiest Covert hid
tunes her nocturnal Note.
Thus with the Year seasons return,
But not to me returns Day,
Or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn.
The very diction of the verses has suffered terribly. I doubt if I should have seen any merit in them had I read them thus in the free verse of a contemporary poet. If this be so it follows that diction in free verse will needs be far more exacting than the diction of metrical verse. It must be more beautiful in itself, because it has
relinquished the technique of one of the main sources of its beauty.
A free versifier may welcome this situation, and say that his poetry will be the better for excluding phrases that are in themselves so little beautiful that they must borrow adventitious beauty from mechanical devices. Well and good—if he can justify himself. But language is refractory, and all technique in Art consists in devices for mastering of obstinate material. If free verse must of its nature be more beautiful than metrical verse, let us rejoice and wait patiently. It is a case of solvitur and ambulando (solving a problem through movement rather than thinking), perhaps one should say volando or volitando (flying or fluttering).
I have myself made so many experiments that I cannot be suspected of wishing to discourage others. No art can flourish that is not alive and growing, and it can only grow by invention of new methods or by discovery of new material. In the art of English verse my own work has led me to think that there is a wide field for exploration in the metrical prosody, and that in carrying on Milton’s inventions in the syllabic verse there is better hope of successful progress than in the technique of free verse as I understand it.
Robert Seymour Bridges OM (1844 – 1930) was a poet who served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1913 until his death. Bridges practiced medicine until retiring to focus on writing.
