Free rhythms

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As free rhythms are called rhyming loose, unbound metric verses with any number of syllables and different numbers of peaks and valleys that still have a certain rhythm. In contrast to prose, correspondence can be seen in the distribution of the elevations. Free rhythms appear in poems without a fixed stanza form , but the verses can still be divided into groups of verses. If the groups are of the same length, one speaks of a division into pseudo-stanzas .

The free rhythms are an invention of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock , who with it broke away from Opitz's meter pressure and consciously sought reference to the ancient ode measures, especially the dithyrambs of Pindar . In addition to the ancient influence, the psalms of David , in the (prose) translation of Martin Luther , as well as the chants of Ossian , which were still considered authentic at the time, should be named as models. Examples of free rhythms appear for the first time in Klopstock's work in The Omnipresent (1758) and in Spring Celebration (1759). From this the first verse as an example:

Not in the ocean of worlds all
I want to plunge myself! do not float,
Where the first creations, the cheers of the Sons of Light,
worship, worship deeply! and pass away in delight!

Just for the drop in the bucket, Just for the
earth, I want to float and worship!
Alleluia! Alleluia! The drop in the bucket
Rann from the hand of the Almighty too!

Otto Knörrich described this detachment from the tradition, which after the already rhymed Klopstock odes also gave up stanza and fixed meter, as the “most important contribution of German poetry to the international formal language of verse”. Klopstock must have been aware of this importance, because in his ode to my friends in 1747 he wrote anticipating:

Do you want to become stanzas,
oh song, or unobtrusively like Pindar's chants,
Like Zeus exalted drunken sons,
tumbling freely out of the creative soul?

The form was continued in Goethe's early poetry ( Wandrers Sturmlied , Ganymed , Mahomets Gesang , Prometheus ) and in general with the poets of Sturm und Drang . As an example, the first verses from Goethe's Ganymede :

How in the
morning glow you glow around me,
spring, beloved! Your eternal warmth, holy feeling, infinite beauty, pushes itself to my heart
with a thousandfold joy of love !




Lessing wrote about Klopstock's The Omnipresent in the 51st literary letter : “Actually it is nothing more than an artificial prose, broken down into all parts of its periods, each of which can be regarded as a single verse of a special syllable measure.” The metrical forms are in fact in Klopstock , Goethe and also with Hölderlin ( Hyperion's Song of Destiny ) by no means arbitrarily and actually only conditionally “free”, since ancient meter measures are very often used, quoted and varied. Looking at the first two verses

Not in the ocean of worlds all
I want to plunge myself! don't float

of the poem metric, so one gets

—◡◡ — ◡ — ◡ — ◡ — ◡
—◡◡ — ◡ | —◡—

and notes in the first verse an iambic lengthened 1st Pherekrateus (—◡◡ — ◡ — ◡) and in the first colon of the second an Adoneus (—◡◡ — ◡). The Adoneus then appears again in the quoted verses by Goethe (“Frühhling, Geli̱ebter |”) or in the first verse of An Schwager Kronos (“Spu̱de dich, Kro̱nos |”). A detachment of the free rhythms from the antique meters only begins afterwards with Novalis ( Hymns to the Night ) and then largely asserts itself in the course of the 19th century.

Further examples can be found at:

From Ingeborg Bachmann as a modern example the beginning of her poem To the Sun :

More beautiful than the remarkable moon and its ennobled light, More beautiful
than the stars, the famous medals of the night,
Much more beautiful than the fiery appearance of a comet
And called too far more beautiful than any other star,
Because your and my life depends on it every day, is the sun.

Free rhythms differ from free verse or rhymed lyric poetry of the modern age on the one hand by the greater regularity of the rhythm and by the elevated, often ecstatic tone. Basically, however, the distinction in terms of the metric form is fuzzy and corresponds more to the assignment to a literary tradition. Therefore, in works that come from the tradition of Romance literatures, one will speak of free verse, or more specifically of vers libre (French) or verso libero (Italian), or in English literature of free verse . In the case of works that go back to Klopstock and the reproduction of solemn ancient or biblical poetry, it is more appropriate to speak of free rhythms.

If one takes the high, ecstatic tone as a distinguishing feature, then one can also describe poems from other literatures in modern poetry as being written in free rhythms, for example works by Walt Whitman , Paul Claudel , TS Eliot and Dylan Thomas . However, one must note that in the scientific literature, for example in connection with Walt Whitman's poetry, the term free verse appears much more frequently than free rhythm (s) .

Another German line of tradition in Baroque originates from the Italian madrigal verse , appears specifically in Goethe as Faust verse and is in turn regarded as the forerunner of the free verse in German.

The term free rhythms is justified in terms of conceptual history, but it is not undisputed. Gerhard Storz suggested the addition of free, autonomous rhythms and Friedrich Beißner wanted to speak of self-rhythmic verse . However, both names could not establish themselves.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: Spring celebration . In: ders .: Oden. Vol. 1, Leipzig 1798, p. 157.
  2. ↑ Knörrich: Lexicon of lyrical forms. Stuttgart 2005, p. 69.
  3. ↑ Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: On my friends v. 5-8. In: ders .: Selected works. Munich 1962, p. 12.
  4. ↑ Goethe: Ganymede . In: Goethe's writings. Eighth volume . GJ Göschen, 1789, p. 210
  5. ^ GE Lessing: Complete Writings. Published by Karl Lachmann. 3. Edition. Vol. 8. Göschen, Stuttgart a. a. 1892, p. 141, digitizedhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3D~IA%3Dsmtlicheschrif08lessuoft~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3D141~ double-sided%3D~LT%3D~PUR%3D
  6. ↑ Knörrich: Lexicon of lyrical forms. Stuttgart 2005, p. 70.