Verse free

Definition

A free verse is a Towards which does not obey a regular structure: neither Meter, neither Rhyme S, nor Stanza S. (Contrary to the worms traditional which observes a fixed number of syllables by worms and worms by stanzas). However, it preserves certain characteristics of the worms: at least, the presence of Subparagraph S a length lower than the sentence, the presence of capital letters at the beginning of line, a page layout letting breathe the white, of the sequences of variable worms of size separated by a jump of line, variable but locatable metric lengths, effects of Crossing-over, echoes sound, etc

Historical

Let us start by specifying that it would be perilous to allot the paternity of the verse free to such or such poet. Of aucuns claim it besides. The “creation” of this (not) proceeded metric takes actually form in the impulse of several writers, themselves influenced by their predecessors, at one time when poetry starts to be freed from the strict rules which she obeys since so many centuries. The verse free appears in a context which makes following the Classicisme and with the Parnassiens ( fine of the 19th century ), it is outlined by certain, is concretized by others, and especially takes part in the “modernization” of poetry.

Well before does not appear the common name of “verse free”, French poetry was authorized already metric freedoms. They were then the “worms irregular”. Thus the Fountain it had chosen this process and explained of it the reason in the foreword of its first Contes : “The author wanted to test which character is cleanest for rimer tales. He believed that the irregular worms having an air which holds much the Prose, this manner could seem most natural, and consequently the best”. They is also the worms of Molière in the Amphitryon .

Versification had been appreciably softened with the wire of the centuries (with authors like Victor Hugo or Mérimée). But the verse free such as one hears it with the modern direction of the term takes root with a large poet, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). The posterity will admit especially the merit to him “to have announced” modern poetry, by melting the bases of what one will call later the symbolism. This draft of poetic revolution was due especially to the innovation of the style of the Petits prose poems . Attention, let us not confuse “verse free” and “poetic prose”. Indeed, the latter remains prose, i.e. a text with coherent sentences and a punctuation, but which is distinguished from traditional prose by a larger lyricism and by the recourse to processes of poetic writing (alliterations, metaphors,…). This poetic prose had already occurred at Chateaubriand and Aloysius Bertrand, for example, but will be badly accommodated by the Romantiques great authors. It is Baudelaire which will give it to the honor, but there is not its only merit. Indeed, Baudelaire indeed composed for the 2nd edition of the Fleurs of the Evil (1861) an epilog in which it practices the verse free. This less known poem will remain unfinished and will not even appear in the third edition of 1868. It is however of an major importance, and it is included/understood why Baudelaire wrote in a letter with its editor Chicken-Malassis in connection with this poem that it “will astonish you” (1860). It is necessary to test by reading it to perceive the innovation of the form for this time:

Quiet like wise and soft like cursed,

I said:

I love you, O my very beautiful, O my charming…

That once…

Your vices without thirst and your loves without heart,

Your taste of the infinite one

Who everywhere, in the evil itself, proclaims himself…

Your bombs, your daggers, your victories, your festivals,

Your suburbs melancholic persons,

Your furnished hotels,

Your gardens full with sighs and intrigues,

Your temples vomitting the prayer in music,

Your despairs of child, your plays of insane old woman,

Your discouragements;

And your plays of artifice, eruptions of joy,

Who make laugh the Sky, dumb man and dark.

Your worthy defect spread out in silk,

And your laughable virtue, with the unhappy glance,

Soft, extasiant itself with the luxury which it deploys…

After Baudelaire a young poet comes whose early talent indisputably contributed to the modernization of poetry in this end of 19th century. Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was not only illustrated in the style of poetic prose, but he also wrote two poems in verse free in his Illuminations (dubious date): Marine and Movement . Had it read the epilog of the Fleurs of the Evil ? Was it only aware of the originality of its writing? The impact of poetries of Rimbaud will have been, as it is known it, considerable, and the poem that here is one of most amazing:

Navy

Copper and money tanks

Money and steel prows

Beat scum,

The stocks of brambles raise

Currents of the moor,

And immense ruts of the backward flow,

Slip by circularly towards the east,

Towards the pillars of the forest,

Towards the barrels of the pier,

Whose angle is run up against by swirls of light.

In 1886 (May and June) are published the Illuminations of Rimbaud, whose reading upsets the French poet Jules Laforgue (1860-1887). This poet, whose participation in a modernization of the writing is well attested, practiced already metric which was freed from the worms traditional (by the odd use of the worms in particular and under the influence of Verlaine inter alia). After the reading of Marine and Movement , Laforgue will make evolve its poetry to the verse free in its posthumous works Of the Flowers of good will (1890) and Derniers to (1890). It is to announce also that Laforgue made the French translation of the collection Leaves off Fatty of American Walt Whitman (1819-1892), who wrote in “blank pours”, i.e. the English verse free. Here an extract of Simple anguish (October 1886):

Oh! that

Guessing the moment most only of nature,

My melody, all and single, go up,

In the evening and redoubles, and does all that it can

And the thing says which is the thing,

And falls down, and begins again,

And makes sorrow,

O solo of sobs,

And begins again and falls down

According to the task which falls on to him.

Oh! that my music

Crucifie,

According to its photography

Accoudée and melancholic person! ….

Large friend of Jules Laforgue and director of the review the Vogue in which will be published the Illuminations of Rimbaud in 1886, Gustave Kahn (1859-1936) was a poet French Symbolist. Some recognize it as author of the first collection of poetry in free verse, the wandering Palais (1887), collection which it will qualify itself in the foreword of his First poems like " the book of origin of the worms libre". If he did not invent the verse free, he was especially made the theorist of it, by taking again and developing what he had already proposed in 1888, in the independent Review: “The importance of this new technique, will be to make it possible any poet to design in him his worms or rather its original stanza, and to write its own and individual rate/rhythm”. These explanations proposed a free “officialization” of the verse. Let us note that on this date, Rimbaud had already written Marines and Mouvement since ten years.

A last name deserves to be mentioned, especially because some allot the free creation of the verse to him: it is about the Polish artist Marie Krysinska (1864-1908) which published in 1890 picturesque Rythmes , a free collection in verse.

After that, many are the poets who cultivated the verse free: Leon Bloy, Persian Saint-John, Andre Salmon, Emile Verhaeren, Paul Claudel, Guillaume Apollinaire, Henri Michaux, Louis Aragon, Rene Tank, Yves Bonnefoy, and much of others.

The following poem of Paul Eluard is an example of modern free verse:

My extreme hands slip on the frozen walls

I have little hope of memory

Already I very lost

I do not have any more these houses of penetrated pinks

Nor streets these branches of the greenest tree

But last echoes of the maternal paddle

My days softened.

the open book (1938-1940).

Last note:: the verse free in its rise did not take the monopoly of the poetic writing. At the 20th century, the poets are still very fond of delicacies worms at regular rates/rhythms, of type alexandrines, and sonnets and quatrains.

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