I have thought about this a lot.
I've thought about this subject a lot.
I have written a book called The Sounds of Poetry.
In the book, I propose that, that distinction is not as
clear cut as you are making it.
Many people read Shakespeare's iambic pentameter
or Milton's iambic pentameter and are not
aware that it's verse.
Many people identify rhyme with verse.
Traditionally, rhyme has been scorned as low class,
and Ben Jonson has a wonderful poem called "The Fit of Rhyme
Against Rhyme," in which he very brilliantly in rhyme says how
rhyme is this vulgar after all the Latin poets and the Greek
poets, who were the models, did not rhyme.
Rhyme was used only for comic effect like in the Ars Poetica,
Horace says that the mountain brings forth a ridiculous mouse,
and ridiculous mouse comes out of all
of this rhetorical heaving.
Any poem that is well written is in rhyme.
You may not be as aware of the like and unlike sounds.
It is possible to write a poem that
obeys the laws of iambic pentameter and its meaning--
the form is inadequate.
It's meaningless.
It is possible to write a free verse poem that
is extremely rhythmical, in which the form is extremely--
as Eliot says, no verse is free if you want to do a good job.
I agree with you that the pervasiveness
of so-called free verse is partly because people don't know
how to write verse, and it's too easy, but let
me read to you-- this by the way,
is my security blanket that I have in my hand.
It's-- it's the best thing I do as a teacher.
My wife, when she taught eighth grade,
asked her students to do it.
I asked PhD students to do it at Berkeley.
The assignment is type up with your own hands,
or write out with your own fingers, an anthology, 30,
35 pages of what--
by example, the definition of what you mean when you say
poetry.
And I don't judge it-- nursery rhymes, song lyrics, whatever,
but because they're self portraits, people often
make them very, very good.
This is mine.
This is about-- every so often, I print it out.
I have a file on my computer that I dump anthology--
the pages aren't numbered, but I guess this is a couple hundred
pages of my favorite poems.
And here's a poem more or less at random.
I just went to the William Carlos Williams section.
Here's a poem by William Carlos Williams--
"Fine Work With Pitch and Copper"
"Fine Work With Pitch and Copper."
"Now they're resting in the flexed light separately
in unison like the sack of sifted stones
stacked regularly by twos about the flat roof, ready after lunch
to be opened and strewn.
The copper in eight foot strips has been beaten lengthwise down
the center at right angles and lies ready to edge the coping.
One still chewing picks up a copper strip and runs his eye
along it."
Let me read the first two--
three stanzas to you again.
First stanza is, "Now they are resting in the fleckless light
separately in unison."
There is the same vowel in each of the lines.
"Now they resting in the fleckless light separately
in unison."
And that "eh" vowel is in a very subtle and effective
relationship to the sibilance, the S's.
"Now they're resting in the fleckless light separately
in unison."
Second stanza-- "like the sacks of sifted stones stacked
regularly by twos."
"Like the sacks of sifted stones stacked regularly,"
and there's the vowel sound from the first stanza comes back
in "regularly".
"Like the sacks of sifted stones stacked regularly by twos."
And the very last word of the stanza is a new sound,
"by twos".
You know, the high pitch.
"By twos about the flat roof, ready after lunch to be opened
and strewn."
"By twos ready after lunch to be opened and strewn."
Read it to you again.
"Now they're resting in the fleckless lights separately
in unison like the sacks of sifted stones stacked regularly
by twos about the flat roof ready after lunch to be opened
and strewn".
Most poets are not so good.
Most-- you know, that-- he's very, very good.
He's not writing in pentameter.
He's not writing in iambs.
He's not writing an end rhyme.
He's got the sounds going very, very well,
and many a poem that says--
many a poems written in rhyme that's strict.
Every word has been so carefully picked and it's doggerel.
It's no good.
You can do it well or ill in either mode,
the rest of the song-- poem is--
"The copper in eight foot strips has been beaten lengthwise down
the center at right angles and lies ready to edge the coping.
One still chewing--" and there practically is end rhyme,
though, its grammatical rhyme.
Ready to-- "The copper in eight foot strips
has been beaten lengthwise down the center at right angles
and lies ready to edge the coping.
One still chewing, picks up a copper strip."
So the first word in the line, the last word in the line rhyme.
"Picks up a copper strip and runs his eye along it."
And the speed of, "runs his eye along it", is part of it.
I don't know if you're familiar with the blank verse of Robert
Frost.
Robert Frost was a great great writer of blank verse.
Here's a poem I commend all the ambitious poets in the room
to get by heart.
It's an amazing piece of blank verse because of the rhymes
in the quote-- "un-rhymed" end quote poem,
"An Old Man's Winter Night" "All out of doors looked darkly
in at him through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
that gathers on the pain in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
was the lamb tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was that brought him
to this creaking room was age."
Let me point out the vowels and consonants in that
un-rhymed-- those four lines.
And also, the broken parallelism of the two two-line units.
Are you with me?
There's two-- "what kept his eyes from giving back the gaze".
Eyes, gaze, it's a kind of a rhyme.
"What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze was the lamp
tilted near them in his hand."
What kept him from remembering what
it was at the end of the line, so eyes gaze was.
"What kept him from remembering what it was that brought him
to this creaking room was age."
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze,
so gaze and age have the same vowel.
Gaze, wise, and was, have the same consonant sound.
And it just comes out so naturally like talking.
"What kept his eyes from giving back the gays
was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was that brought him
to this creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels around him at a loss and having scared
the cellar under him in clomping here,
he scared it once again in clomping off,
and scared the outer night, which has its sounds, familiar,
like the roar of trees and crack of branches, common things,
but nothing so like beating on a box."
Not end rhyme, but rhymes like mad.
I'll skip to one other--
I don't want to go on too much.
I'll give you one other sentence from that poem.
Every pause in the sentence ends with "p", a dental.
Give me a second.
It's so hard to pick up somewhere,
not to do it all in one strand.
"A light he was to no one but himself where now he sat,
A quiet light, and then not even that."
And the length of the different units.
"A light he was to no one but himself where now he sat."
That's longer than a line.
"A light he was no one but himself" line ending.
"Where now he set, concerned with he knew what,
a quiet light, and then not even that."
You have to say these things aloud to hear them.
Some people are very frustrated by my book, The Sounds of Poetry
because it doesn't have any little basins and javelins
in it, and parts of the words are never
in all caps or italics.
You just-- I just say, listen, the way
I'm just talking to you now.
I'd say you have to listen to this.
You have to hear.
The free verse, so-call it free verse of Wallace Stevens
and of William Carlos Williams and of Elizabeth Bishop is more
musical, more formally exacting, more stringent,
more beautiful than a lot of verse that is written
technically, A-B-A-B with end rhyme.
The guy who asked the question just did this.
[LAUGHTER]