Free Verse – Interesting Literature

The Invention of Free Verse: Tennyson’s ‘Semele’

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 the Biblical Psalms. Before Whitman, the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart also wrote a wonderful poem which prefigures Whitman’s psalm-like free verse; rather pleasingly, a section of it is about his cat. What is certain is that Whitman’s influence ranged far and wide in nineteenth-century poetry, and he was read widely in France, where ‘free verse’ gave rise to vers libre, a kind of unrhymed poetry less exuberant and more staid than Whitman’s, but similarly untrammelled by rhyme or fixed patterns.

What is Free Verse?

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. What is free verse? And what’s the difference between ‘free verse’ and vers libre?

10 Classic Examples of Free Verse

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

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.

A Short Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Snake’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘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 language and meaning may be useful.

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

A Short Analysis of Walt Whitman’s ‘I Hear America Singing’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

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 metre. Others, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, would follow his lead. But in fact free verse had already arrived in English poetry – or, at least, poetry written in English, if not by the English. The pioneer in this first verse revolution was Walt Whitman. (We’ve outlined the history of free verse here.)