FREE VERSE & ITS KINFOLK, WEEKS 8-10

WHAT WE’LL COVER
This week's reading introduces some of the common rationales for free verse, lays out Beyers' approaches to free verse as a form, then explores some historical contexts for the origins of free verse in English. Beyers traces a long-running tradition of formally loose verse from the late 17th through early 20th centuries, a tradition that had its own rules of engagement, including expected relationships of form, subject matter, speaker, and occasion, all of which readers could recognize and negotiate. He argues that in this tradition form was semanticized in specific ways that prepared the ground for 20th century revolutions of form and speakerly subjectivity. 

We will also revisit the definitions, nature and uses of accentual verse and wallow around in the border swamp between "loose iambics" and free verse.

READING: BOOKS & PHOTOCOPIES:

Beyers: Chapters 1-2 (Chapter 3 also recommended)
EF: Organic Form, Free Verse
If you have Raffel, read chapters 16, 17, 18

READING: POETICS:

Hulme: Romanticism and Classicism MODERN 889
Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent MODERN 941, from Hamlet 948, from The Metaphysical Poets 949

Hopkins: Letters MODERN 873
Yeats: Introduction MODERN 883, esp. "Style and Attitude"

VOCABULARY / PRINCETON:

Ode, free verse, American Poetry III: Modernist Poetry (p. 54), Objective correlative

READING: POEMS:

With Beyers:

Cowley: Ode: On Liberty

Collins: Ode: On the Poetical Character 613, Ode to Evening 615
The Passions, Ode to Liberty

Smart: from Jubilate Agno 625

Blake: To the Evening Star 671
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

Gray: The Bard

Wordsworth: Ode: Intimations of Immortality 728

Keats: Ode to Psyche 843

Shelley: Mount Blanc 796

Whitman: Song of Myself 961

Arnold: Dover Beach 999

Moore: An Octapus MODERN 444

Eliot: Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock 1230/MODERN 463, The Waste Land 1236/MODERN 472

Accentual Poems:

Hardy: Neutral Tones 1049

Hopkins: poems begin on page 1062 in the general anthology, on page 66 in the MODERN

Yeats: The Fisherman MODERN 104, Easter 1916 105, Under Ben Bulben 138

Stevens: The Snow Man 247

Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow 294

Jeffers: Shine Perishing Republic 1210/MODERN 415, Hurt Hawks 1212/MODERN 416, Fawn's Foster Mother 416

Ransom: Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter 1255 (same meter as Hardy's Neutral Tones)

Gurney: To His Love 1260/MODERN 496

Eliot: Sweeney Among the Nightengales 469, from The Four Quartets: Dry Salvages 1249, Little Gidding MODERN 488

Auden: September 1, 1939 MODERN 801, A New Year Greeting 814, A Lullaby 815, Age of Anxiety

Bishop: The Fish 1409/CONTEMP 21, In the Waiting Room CONTEMP 34

Swenson: Question CONTEMP 46

Stafford: Traveling Through the Dark CONTEMP 76

Merrell: An Upward Look CONTEMP 324

Revard: October Isle of Sky 1719

WHAT WE’LL DO IN CLASS:

1) Review the relationships among form, subject matter, speaker, and occasion which Beyers traces in poems of the "loose" tradition. We will probably use Eliot as our focal point, but you should also expect to discuss Moore, Whitman, and the Romantics.

2) Discuss modern uses of accentual verse, using Hopkins & Yeats as exemplars of two distinct types, but also touching on Bishop, Jeffers, Eliot, & others.

3) Continue small group workshop.