Free verse

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In the doctrine of verse, forms of verse that dispense with any metrical or tonal connection are called free verse . It developed in the 19th century and has been the dominant genre in poetry since the 20th century .

Demarcation

Historically, the metrically ordered, mostly alternating rhyming verses, which come from the Italian madrigal and were very popular in Germany and France in the 17th and 18th centuries, were also referred to as free verse . However, the term madrigal verse is better for the German and vers mêlés for the French version of this verse form.

A further distinction must be made between free verse as a generic and largely negatively defined term, which describes a genre through a group of (missing) features such as rhyme , meter and stanzas , and the expression of this genre in the various national literatures. The term free verse is occasionally used when speaking of this form of poetry in French or English literature, but it is better to use the specific term in each case, i.e. vers libre in French, free verse in English , verso libero in Italian, verso libre in Spanish literature, etc. In the narrower sense, free verse is the expression of this genre in German literature. It should be noted, however, that the perceptible differences since the time of its origin in the 19th century are greatly reduced from the middle of the 20th century, at least in formal terms, so that today we can actually speak of a “globalized”, modern verse.

history

One of the two main roots of free verse are the free rhythms , which were developed by Klopstock in the middle of the 18th century , were based heavily on ancient ominous measures and were characterized by high, ecstatic tones. They were taken up in Sturm und Drang , among others in the poetry of the young Goethe and in the Oden Hölderlins and continued in the 19th century with numerous others, whereby the antique touches increasingly faded into the background ( Heinrich Heine , Detlev von Liliencron , Arno Holz ).

The second root of modern free verse is the poetry of the American Walt Whitman , especially his main work Leaves of Grass, written in rhyming, rhythmic verse . A translation of this can then be found in the founding year of the vers libre in 1886 in the French magazine La Vogue, which served as the organ of this movement . The translation by Jules Laforgue signals Whitman's influence on the French poets, at the same time the vers libre, in its consistent rejection of all tradition, is the completion of what Baudelaire , Verlaine , Rimbaud and Mallarmé had prepared with the vers libéré .

The free verse remained largely unknown then until the early 20th century outside France until TE Hulme and FS Flint French verslibristes 1909 Poets Club presented in London, which later became the nucleus of the imagism was. TS Eliot spoke of the birth of imagism as the "usual and suitable reference point for the beginning of modern poetry". Through the mediation of the imagists, the vers libre then exerted a lasting (and still lasting) influence on European and Anglo-American poetry. In addition to Eliot, the Americans Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell should be mentioned as important intermediaries .

As far as the German development is concerned, there are no such clear reference points that can be dated with dates. From the beginning of the 20th century there is hardly any talk of free rhythms and from Expressionism onwards one says of a poem that it is written in "free verse", or one says that it is "modern", which then means the same thing.

Features of free verse

Pound formulated the rhythmic program of the Imagists in 1912, according to which "to compose in the order of the musical phrase and not according to the metronome". In contrast to a naive understanding of freedom, according to the free verse or the vers libre, Pound increases the requirements and Pound admonishes: “Do not believe that a clever person can be duped when you deal with the difficulties of unspeakably difficult art express good prose by chopping your work into regular lines! "And he quotes Eliot's sentence" No verse is libre for those who want to achieve something "with emphatic approval.

This expresses a rejection of any arbitrariness, which, conversely, corresponds to the implementation of the romantic concept of “organic form” in the practice of poetic creation, where “organic” means the correspondence of form and content. It follows from this that the individuality and uniqueness of a subject cannot correspond to a traditional, once and for all fixed form.

However , it turns out to be very difficult to determine practically applicable, operational characteristics of the free verse, since - as said above - the free verse determines itself rather negatively. There is again agreement that the mere absence of features such as meter, rhyme and stanza does not constitute free verse.

While the free verse gives a rejection of the binding in the sense of a regular specification, it can be seen in many examples that binding in the sense of connection plays a much more important role than in traditional verse, where tonal references such as alliteration , assonance , consonance and semantic-rhetorical Recurrences such as antithesis , parallelism , anaphor, etc. as (optional) verse decorations apply to the very predictable, repetitive characteristics that determine meter and / or rhyme scheme. In free verse, all of these possibilities of linguistically indicating or reproducing connections and relationships appear equally alongside one another.

This can be illustrated using the example of the first verses of Walt Whitman's poem Song of Myself , in which recurrences of words are highlighted in italics and those of sounds are underlined:

I c elebrate my s elf , and s ing my s elf ,
And what I ass u me y ou shall ass u me ,
F o r every at o m belonging to me as good belongs to you .

I l oa fe and inv i te m y s ou l,
I l ean and l oafe at my ea se ob s erving a s p ea r of s ummer grass.

As you can see, these references and repetitions are very tightly interwoven, which is what defines the essence of the poem in this and other cases of exemplary free verse. There is hardly a word or a syllable in these few lines that does not have correspondences elsewhere in one form or another - sometimes multiple times. For example, loafe in the fifth line is connected to lean by alliteration and repetition of loafe in the fourth line, which is connected to soul by assonance . Etc. If you follow these links, almost everything is connected to everything in a network.

Classifying free verse based on certain characteristics is also difficult. Charles Allen proposed a distinction between tonic freivers ( accentual free verse ) and cadenced free verse .

In the tonic Freivers , the distribution of the linguistic material over the lines of verse corresponds to the division into syntactic units, i.e. each line of verse corresponds to a syntactically relatively independent phrasing unit and consequently the verse boundaries compared to prose are not marked, but the emphasis on prose is strong Rhythmization and the means described above are marked. The quoted verses by Whitman provide an example of the tonic Freivers.

In the cadenced Freivers, on the other hand, the lines of verse do not match the syntactic units, which means that the dispatches are strongly marked compared to the prose.

Examples of cadented Freivers are the poem by Erich Fried, quoted below , in which the prose material found in an advertisement is used exclusively by dividing it into lines of verse, i.e. cadencing the poetic effect. Another example is a poem by Ernst Meister , from which one can clearly read off the tendency towards short and shortest lines of verse that is methodologically conditioned in cadented Freivers:

And what
does this sun want
us, what

jumps
out of the narrow gate of
that great glow?

I do
n't know anything darker
than the light.

A steepening according to the syntactic units would result in a completely different poem and would look something like this:

And what does
this sun want us,
what jumps out of the narrow gate of
that great glow?
I don't know anything darker
than the light.

It is above all verses of this cadenced type against which the accusation is made that they owe their character primarily to the printer. The comparison above shows that this accusation may be true sometimes, but not always, and only the exact choice of cadence allows the poem to actually arise. In addition, such a cadence brings a slowdown. This can be hesitation or deliberation, for example above, when the tone remains on the question word “what” and then the monosyllable “jumps” the sudden emanation, reproducing the emanation .

As with so many other distinctions, here too the types rarely appear pure and unmixed. The normal case is more that in parts the tonic dominates and then in parts that should be particularly important or in which a slowing down of the rhythm is desired, cadenced short lines are used.

The free verse in German poetry

Like the classification of free verse according to formal characteristics, in German literature in particular it is difficult to distinguish between traditions and schools compared to developments in France and England, where literary groups such as the verslibristes and the imagists played a significant role in tracing lines of development simplified. Nevertheless, Christian Wagenknecht thinks he can distinguish three forms of free verse in German literature, namely

  • free verse, adhered to the tradition of free rhythms,
  • Bertolt Brecht's “rhyming poetry in irregular rhythms” and
  • what he called “prosaic lyric poetry”.

The first group is in the tradition of free rhythms, but breaks away from their tendency to quote classical oden measures in an antique way. Nonetheless, there remains a pronounced rhythmic structure, which often approximates the regular repetition, as well as the high, often solemn tone (which in Expressionism is often elevated to pathos ) and not infrequently biblical echoes. As representatives here are Georg Trakl , Else Lasker-Schüler , Ernst Stadler and Franz Werfel , after 1945 examples can be found in Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann , of which here the first verses of Invocation of the Great Bear :

Big Bear, come down shaggy night,
clouds fur with old eyes,
starry eyes,
shimmering through the thicket break
your paws with claws
Star claws,
vigilant we keep the herds,
but banished from you, and mistrust
your weary flanks and sharp
half covered teeth ,
old bear.

As in many other aspects, Bertolt Brecht occupies a special position here, too, who does not speak of “free verse” but of “rhyming poetry with irregular rhythms”, corresponding to the title of an essay he wrote in 1938 while in exile in Moscow. In it he gives as an example the two end stanzas of the poem The Youth and the Third Reich from the German Satires . These are:

Yes, if the children remained children,
they could always be told fairy tales.
But since they
are getting older you can't.

A conventional metrization of these lines would look something like this:

◡ — ◡ — ◡ — ◡ — ◡
—◡◡ — ◡ — ◡ — ◡◡ — ◡
—◡ — ◡ — ◡ — ◡
◡ — ◡—

This could be considered a free verse since there is apparently no uniform meter. The rhythmization given by Brecht, on the other hand, is quite regular ( trochaic ):

- ◡ - ◡ - ◡ - ◡ - ◡ - ◡ - ◡
Yes if the Child of the Child of the stayed- ben then
- ◡ - ◡ - ◡ - ◡ —◡ - ◡ - ◡ - ◡ —◡
Can- te man ih- nen in the- mer March chen he- tough- len
- ◡— ◡ - ◡ - ◡ - ◡
There she a- ber äl- ter who- the
- ◡ - ◡ - ◡ -
Can man it Not.

Brecht remarks: "The missing feet must be taken into account when speaking by extending the previous foot or by pausing." The considerable difference that results from the conventional metrization (and thus the conventional form of presentation) and Brecht's (almost in the sense of Andreas Heusler ) musically -time interpretation results can be seen in the last line, which, conventionally understood as two iambas, seems strangely flat, but in Brecht's interpretation every single syllable of the last verse is emphasized and virtually provided with an exclamation mark: “Can! man! it! Not!"

In addition to the musical aspect of rhythmization, Brecht addresses a gestural-dance aspect in the same essay:

The sentence of the Bible "tear out the eye that annoys you" has underlaid a gesture, that of command, but it is not expressed purely gestural, since "that annoys you" actually has another gesture that is not expressed , namely that of a reason. Expressed in purely gestural terms, the sentence is called (and Luther, who “looked the people in the mouth”, also forms it like this): “If your eye annoys you: tear it out!” You can see at first glance that the formulation is gestural is much richer and purer.

According to Brecht, the requirement of the verse is that where the imagists demanded that an object or a picture be expressed as precisely as possible in words, the verse expresses the linguistic attitude of the lyrical speaker as precisely as possible. Incidentally, the reference to the Bible here does not seem to be accidental, as it runs like a red thread through the development of free verse. Even for Klopstock, the language of biblical poetry and here again the prose translation of these texts by Martin Luther was a model for his free rhythms and the elevated language of the King James Bible played a similar role for Walt Whitman and thus for the free verse .

Just as Brecht fully agrees with Pound with regard to the primacy of rhythm, so he too warns of the danger of arbitrariness in free verse:

In general, this free way of treating the verse, as must be admitted, is a great seduction to formlessness: the quality of the rhythmization is not even guaranteed as far as with regular rhythmization (where, however, well-counted verse feet do not yet result in rhythmization). The proof of the pudding lies in the food.

The third group, referred to by Wagenknecht as prosaic poetry , is particularly affected by this seduction into formlessness. "She justifies her poetry-like presentation mainly from the claim: to be read with as much concentrated attention as the reader is accustomed to show a poem." It remains to be seen whether this claim will be met. The evaluation becomes particularly problematic when a renunciation of artistic form becomes part of the program with the aim of exchanging authenticity for art, as it was the case with the representatives of the New Subjectivity in the 1970s.

As an example for this group, a few lines from When hubris clawed me in Harry's bar by Christoph Derschau :

Eaten for almost 60 marks
and
looked around,
what's really going on
with this Venice:
this damn environmental shit
in connection with the corrupt
bureaucracy!

Well

Even with poems of this kind, according to Brecht, it is of course true that “the proof of the pudding lies in the food”, but conversely it does not follow that not eating refutes the pudding. This also applies when the language material found becomes a poem through interlacing, i.e. a work of art in the sense of an objet trouvé . As an example, a poem by Erich Fried , which arose from the text of a newspaper advertisement:

The police chief
in Berlin is looking for:
Sheepdogs.

Age one to four years,
with and without
pedigree.

Requirements: impeccable nature
ruthless sharpness
pronounced persecution

instinct indifference to shooting
and
healthy
[...]

Finally, it should be noted that, as in German literature as a whole, there are also numerous side effects and exceptions here. As their voice and last example a short poem by Ernst Herbeck , also known under his pseudonym Alexander :

The poem is a
prophecy. The poem is a
varum. The poet
arranges the language
in short sentences.
What is over is the poem itself.

It couldn't be formulated more succinctly.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "... the point de repère usually and conveniently taken [...] as the starting point of modern poetry". TS Eliot: To criticize the critic . Speech at Washington University in June 1953. In: ders .: To criticize the critic and other writings. Faber & Faber, London 1965.
  2. ↑ Ezra Pound: A Review. In: ders .: word and manner. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1971, p. 61.
  3. ↑ Ezra Pound: A Review. In: ders .: word and manner. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1971, p. 64.
  4. ^ "No verse is libre for the man who wants to do to a good job." Translation by Eva Hesse in: Pound: Wort und Weise. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1971, p. 78.
  5. ^ Whitman: Song of Myself . In: ders .: Leaves of Grass . David McKay, Philadelphia 1892.
  6. ^ Hans-Jürgen Diller: Metrics and Verslehre. Düsseldorf 1978, p. 94 f.
  7. ↑ Charles Allen: Cadenced Free Verse. In: College English 9 (1948), pp 195-199.
  8. ↑ Ernst Meister: In the time gap. Luchterhand, Darmstadt & Neuwied 1976, p. 7.
  9. ^ Hans-Jürgen Diller: Metrics and Verslehre. Düsseldorf 1978, p. 95.
  10. ^ Christian Wagenknecht: German metric. Munich 1974, p. 101 ff.
  11. ↑ Karl Otto Conrady (ed.) The great Conrady. Düsseldorf 2008, p. 845.
  12. ↑ Brecht: About rhyming poetry with irregular rhythms. In: Works. Vol. 22: Writings 2nd part 1. Frankfurt a. M. 1993, p. 362.
  13. ↑ Brecht: About rhyming poetry with irregular rhythms. In: Works. Vol. 22: Writings 2nd part 1. Frankfurt a. M. 1993, p. 359 f.
  14. ↑ Brecht: About rhyming poetry with irregular rhythms. In: Works. Vol. 22: Writings 2nd part 1. Frankfurt a. M. 1993, p. 363.
  15. ^ Christian Wagenknecht: German metric. Munich 1974, p. 102.
  16. ↑ Christoph Derschau: When hubris clawed me in Harry's bar . In: Jan Hans, Uwe Herms , Ralf Thenior (Eds.): Poetry catalog Federal Republic. Poems. Biographies. Statements. Goldmann, Munich 1978, p. 78.
  17. ↑ Erich Fried: animal market. Purchase. In: ders .: reasons. Collected poems. Wagenbach 1989.
  18. ↑ Ernst Herbeck: A text about a poem. In: ders .: The rabbit !!! Selected poems. Jung & Jung, Salzburg & Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-99027-004-2 , p. 223.