home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
The Epic Interactive Encyclopedia 1997
/
The_Epic_Interactive_Encyclopedia_97.iso
/
f
/
free_verse
/
infotext
< prev
Wrap
Text File
|
1992-09-03
|
820b
|
21 lines
Poetry without metrical form. At the
beginning of the 20th century, under the very
different influences of Whitman and Mallarme,
many poets believed that the 19th century had
accomplished most of what could be done with
regular metre, and rejected it, in much the
same spirit as Milton had rejected rhyme,
preferring irregular metres that made it
possible to express thought clearly and
without distortion. This was true of T S
Eliot and the Imagists; it was also true of
poets who, like the Russians Esenin and
Mayakovsky, placed emphasis on public
performance. Poets including Robert Graves
and Auden have criticized free verse on the
ground that it lacks the difficulty of true
accomplishment, but their own metrics would
have been considered loose by earlier
critics. The freeness of free verse is
largely relative.