Free Verse: The Second First

Critiques, prompts & challenges.
Post Reply
Yejun
Posts: 229
Joined: December 22nd, 2007, 4:17 pm

Free Verse: The Second First

Post by Yejun » October 12th, 2009, 8:26 pm

There were two.

The first one began about a hundred years ago. The heroes or villains of that story were T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.C. Williams, Amy Lowell, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ford Maddox Ford and others. Feel free to add or argue that they weren't involved, it's an interesting story and one that I want to talk about someday.

But not today.

As successful as they were in changing the way poetry was written, by the 1940's a resurgent traditionalism had settled in. This was not unique to poetry. With WWII and the beginning of the Cold War, traditional ideas made a startling comeback (or were skillfully put in place by the powers that be if you have a conspiratorial mind) across the board. In history and philosophy departments, to name two fields that I know a little bit about, the progressives and the pragmatists were replaced by "objective" traditional historians and analytical philosophy (the symbolic logic of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell).

Good work was still being done, it was different work from the previous decades. A fresh start if you will. Or a plot if you want. It is of course dialectical or at least can be seen as dialectical.

In poetry, the heroes or villains of this era were Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov, the early Robert Lowell, perhaps early Adrienne Rich, and James Merrill.

But then stuff happened again:

1. On October 13, 1955, Allen Ginsberg read his recently published poem "Howl" at Gallery Six:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving, hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
As Gross and McDowell put it in Sound and Form in Modern Poetry:
No reading or poem has ever had such an immediate impact on the literary landscape.
2. In 1959, Robert Lowell switched from metrical poetry to free verse with Life Studies

from "Skunk Hour"
A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love . . . ." I hear
my ill-spirit sop in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--
3. On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath committed suicide. Her posthumously published book Ariel became one of the defining poetry books of the sixties:

from "Lady Lazarus"
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it----

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?----

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
One can easily see why many poets were influenced by these poems/poets. They hold up amazingly well and are better, more powerful the third, fourth, or fifth time around than they were when I first read them.


4. In 1969, Stephen Berg and Robert Meezey edited Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms
An enormously influential anthology . . . . The poets whose work was included . . . must all have been told at one time or another by some eminent authority that what they were writing was not merely bad but that it was not poetry at all -- so it is not surprising that the personal statements they submitted along with their poem are alternately so truculent and so apologetic. They knew what they were doing was not respected in academia; they had little hope that it ever would be. They were about to win the war, but they had no way of knowing that.
Keith Maillard, "The New Formalism and the Return to Prosody" in New Expansive Poetry, pp. 62-63.

They won and they won so successfully that by the time I was in high school, my teacher could state that rhyme and meter were not techniques used in serious poetry anymore. As good as many of these poets and poems were, was it enough to completely eradicate tools that had been the mainstay of poetry for five hundred years? Is that what happened?

My answers are no and no. I'll explain later.

Post Reply

Return to “Workshop & Prompts”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 5 guests