[David Rosenthal]

I pretty much agree with Sam. I hope I was clear enough in my post to make it clear that I don't totally agree with Lew.

I think saying "verse" means "metered" works well as long as "metered" is understood to be a broad concept. Beyond accents, syllables, and stresses, it can mean any way in which a poet measures lines -- this can be subjective, as Sam says, or according to more or less carefully thought out systems of, say, breath lengths, phrase lengths, units of content, syntactic units, typographical intervals, etc.

"Free verse," as someone as knowledgeable about the history of poetry as Lew should know, does not mean "free of verse" but "verse that is free" -- free of certain assumptions and rules about meter, structure, and usage, not necessarily free of "verse" itself. It has always struck me as odd that Lew doesn't see this distinction, that he is so arbitrary about what he counts as "metered," and that so many of practitioners free verse don't seem to understand the distinction either.

Anyway, I agree that lineation is the key, but really only because lineation is the evidence of some sort of meter, be it rigorous, subjective, or otherwise. A line of prose goes on forever until it hits the physical limitations of its media (i.e. -- the margins of a page). A line of verse goes until it reaches its measured limit, however that is defined. Or something like that.

In any case, none of this helps answer the question up top, which is what makes poetry poetic. An essay, story, novel, epic, play, or poem could be written in prose or verse. What makes us decide that The Iliad, Hamlet, Mending Wall, and De Rerum Natura are all in fact "poetry?" That seems to me to be a much more slippery question.

David R.

[FOsen]

I found Lew's didacticism as tiresome as everyone else did, but I think I agree with him. I don't think he'd deny that a flexible iambic or het met line qualifies as verse -nor would he deny that blank verse is verse.

Frank

[This message has been edited by FOsen (edited December 08, 2008).]

[David Rosenthal]

Originally posted by FOsen:
I found Lew's didacticism as tiresome as everyone else did, but I think I agree with him. I don't think he'd deny that a flexible iambic or het met line qualifies as verse -nor would he deny that blank verse is verse.

Frank

But he does insist that most of what is typically called "free verse" is prose, albeit prose poetry, but prose. The question driving this thread, though, I think, is not whether or not blank verse is verse. In Lew's scheme, an essay or story could be written in verse or prose. The question is, what makes it poetry or not poetry? Presumably it is something other than the mode of writing (prose or verse), since poetry is a genre (in Lew's scheme).

David R.

[Jonathan Kessler]

Quincy, thanks for this:
"By working in blank verse, he became acutely aware of the real tension between the line as a unit and the cadences across lines, without the clang of the rhyme to justify ending a line at a given point. The line's integrity actually becomes more obviously important when there isn't a rhyme. It needs a bit more organic justification, even when you're enjambing the hell out of the piece as a whole."

This really clarified blank verse for me, which I'd always struggled with. I find it daunting, and too near the blurry line between prose and poetry, but what seems to delineate in the end is meter. Frost's tennis court net.

As an aside, I've been reading Anthony Hecht lately, in particular, Check out "The Short End" or "Venetian Vespers" as other impressive examples of extended blank verse narrative poems.

One thing that strikes me as the MO of blank verse goes back to poetry's earliest origins as an oral tradition, a codified and rhythmic method to convey long narrative.

[FOsen]

David - I just saw your comment and I agree with you.

At first, I'd said that I don't think it's helpful (right, perhaps, but not helpful) for formalist poets to insist that free verse isn't verse at all (as LT would have it), but I deleted that part of my original post, since I thought it was more important just to correct some of the more obvious mischaracterizations of Turco's position.

btw, I'm still not cetain all posting understand the distinction between blank verse and free verse.

[John Riley]

I have two questions. What is a flexible iambic line? Lines of irregular length? If so, does that meet the requirement established for formal poetry used here at the Sphere?

Second, are there differences in standards for metrical poetry used here and what is considered to be formal poetry outside of the Sphere?

Thanks

[FOsen]

Iambic lines with frequent substitutuions - trochees, anapests.

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi Julie

Excuse my ignorance and possible impudence, but aren't you actually asking whether there is a difference between free verse and prose? That is the only way your question might make sense. As has been discussed, blank verse has meter so it is definitely not the same thing as prose, and of course blank verse is very different from free verse, which, as Robert Frost remarked, is like playing tennis without the net.

Chris

[Gregory Dowling]

Chris, if you want an answer from Julie you might want to send her a PM alerting her to the revival of this thread, since she actually asked the question you refer to nearly two years ago.

[Michael Cantor]

Are you on a treasure hunt, Chris? Last week you revived a thread on Betjeman that went back to 2008. Now this from 2005/2003.

If you're going to resurrect old threads, why not indicate you're doing so? Many of us can't remember what we had for breakfast, let alone what we said five years ago, so there's the danger of (a) wasting time by rewriting and restating something you already said in years earlier, or - even worse - putting up a comment that directly contradicts the one you made previously. I am large, I contain multitudes - but I hate to demonstrate it publicly.

That said, I agree with the importance of lineation cited by Quincy (and, through him, by Ray), and Sam and others - plus meter - as what differentiates blank verse from prose. There is a musicality and sonic and emotional rhythm that these elements bring to blank verse that almost never exists in even the most lyrical prose. (This is at least partly due to my particular ear and taste, but when I do come across prose that particularly excites me with its "poetic" sense, I often find that it is essentially metrical.)

Somewhat off-topic question: at one stage I was writing little but formal, rhymed verse; but for the past few years I find myself moving more and more into blank verse, and free verse with a metrical undertone. What I am also experiencing is that I seem to have more difficulty in finding a home for blank verse that for formal verse of equal (in my estimation) quality. There are a few quality journals that appear to like free verse, but over the broader range my sense is that blank verse falls in the cracks - that the form-friendly journals tend toward rhyme, and the free verse-oriented journals obviously brint free verse - and that when they want to broaden their range they favor rhyme and classic forms, rather than blank verse. Does anybody lese share this feeling?