In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses an early Tennyson poem Who invented ‘free verse’? Walt Whitman (1819-92) often gets the credit, although his decision to write in free verse – unrhymed poetry without a regular metre or rhythm – may have been influenced by […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) T. S. Eliot said it didn’t exist. Robert Frost likened it to playing tennis with the net down. T. E. Hulme thought it was one way in which English verse might reinvent itself for the modern age. Walt Whitman is credited with inventing it. […]
Free verse – poetry that has no regular metre or line lengths, and is often unrhymed – has been a feature of poetry since at least the nineteenth century, although earlier examples can also be found.
‘Snake’ is probably D. H. Lawrence’s best-known poem. Lawrence wrote ‘Snake’ while he was living on the island of Sicily, in the beautiful resort, Taormina, on the east side of the island. ‘Snake’ is conversational in tone, which makes it reasonably accessible; nevertheless, some words of analysis on the poem’s […]
A reading of a classic short Whitman poem by Dr Oliver Tearle Anglophone poets discovered free verse twice. The second, more famous time occurred in around 1908, when the Staffordshire-born poet T. E. Hulme began writing short poems modelled on the French vers libre form, without regular rhyme or formal […]