As with all the arts, over the centuries British verse, prose and oratory spawned innovations, many of which either became lasting traditions, or were at least revisited and recycled from time to time. Some of these new habits were entirely native, while others were inspired by or modified by practices in European countries and America. From the early twentieth century on, all verse composed in English has been subject to global influences from a variety of Englishes and from the literary traditions of many other languages and cultures.
Milton explored what we now call free verse in Samson Agonistes, although it was not until the late nineteenth century that free verse became popular again, partly through the influence of French poets and of America’s Walt Whitman. Browning experimented freely with both style and subject matter, although he was less adventurous with form. After the upheaval of the Great War, writers in all genres embraced innovation to celebrate what was seen as a “New Age”. The poems of the Victorian Gerard Hopkins, first published in 1918, were seized on as something new, and in particular, since readers did not always recognize his reliance on traditional metres (as described in Chapter 14 above), welcomed as verse that seemed excitingly free in form.
In 1913 Ezra Pound had written in the American magazine Poetry a manifesto for what he called imagisme (spelt in the French fashion), in which poets should avoid vague generalities or abstractions, and also “avoid poetic diction in favour of the spoken language”. Conventional metrical forms should be abandoned in favour of “sequence of the musical phrase” in a rhythm “which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed”. Pound’s proposal was attacked by T.S. Eliot, an American poet living in England, in “Reflections on Vers Libre”, an essay in the New Statesman in 1917. Eliot claimed that vers libre (the term was coined in France in the 1880s) is not a possible verse-form because the concept is entirely negative, having “(1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence of metre”.
What is called blank verse lacks end-rhyme, but the term is always restricted to a metrical pattern of five feet per line. New Age poets began to write passages of blank verse studded with occasional shorter lines. Many of these poets went further, writing in lines of frequently varied lengths without end-rhyme, at the same time seeking liberation from the traditional themes and attitudes found in previously published poetry.
Two poets born in the 1880s experimented brilliantly in free verse: read and enjoy D.H. Lawrence’s ever-popular Snake, probably written in 1920-21 and published in 1923, and T.S. Eliot’s conversational Journey of the Magi, written in 1927. For all his criticism of Pound’s theorizing, Eliot does illustrate, line by line, musical phrasing appropriate to the thoughts and emotions expressed by his elderly king, which makes speaking the poem a satisfying dramatic experience. (Eliot’s own incantation of the poem, available in poetryarchive.com, is rather flat, but it will give you his intended rhythm.) Lawrence’s style too is essentially colloquial, but, unlike Eliot’s poem, Snake is also larded with a few more traditionally poetical expressions. The lines vary enormously in length and rhythm: if presented with the text of Snake written out continuously like prose, you might find it difficult to work out precisely where lines and stanzas begin and end, whereas with the Eliot poem such a task would be fairly straightforward.
The down-to-earth realism of many of the poets of the Great War was inspirational. Wilfred Owen’s skill with half-rhymes was admired and imitated. Throughout the twentieth century the most respected poets writing in English have not only built on the freedoms developed by Eliot, Lawrence, Owen, Edith Sitwell, Robert Graves, W.H. Auden and e.e.cummings, but have also returned from time to time to older forms such as the sonnet and villanelle. This two-fold practice enriched the work of such wonderfully musical poets as Dylan Thomas, Charles Causley, R.S. Thomas, Ted Hughes and Norman MacCaig.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, many new writers concentrated entirely on what they thought of as free verse, abandoning our more formal heritage. This is risky for anyone not naturally endowed with a strong sense of rhythm. Practice in attempting such forms as sonnets and villanelles both trains the ear and encourages economy of expression. Nowadays all too many would-be-poets fill pages with colloquial outbursts or trendy prose devoid of interesting rhythmic structure or aural delight, seemingly unaware that the great poets of all periods are especially loved for their music.
This is not the place to discuss all the types and forms of what in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been published as “poetry”. That needs a whole book to itself. It does seem to me, however, that a great deal of what is printed in poetry magazines these days, whether or not it appears to be set out in verse-like lines on the page, is not technically verse, in so far as there is often not much rhythmical patterning or music, either within what purport to be line-units, or in the piece as a whole. Instead, we are offered merely new subject-matter and clever (or clever-clever) ideas, expressed in apparent transcriptions of disjointed speech and in a variety of prose styles, some deservedly evaluated as poetry, but far too much of it clumsily unrewarding to read aloud.
The current popularity, especially among the young, of poetry-slams, in which regularly metrical verse is delivered orally, is unsurprising. Here rhythm, and even old-fashioned rhyme, alliteration and assonance, are still prized.
My aim in this book is to encourage all who love poetry, or aspire to do so, to hear or speak or compose verse in English with ever-increasing aural discrimination and delight. Listen again to Judi Dench revealing the skills of Shakespeare. Discover afresh the rhythms of Eliot’s verse through readings by Jeremy Irons. Hear how sound and sense interweave in a whole range of poems as spoken by Anton Lesser and Harriet Walter and Sam West. Learn from these experts: learn especially to enjoy the music of English verse.