The End of the Line for Modern Poetry

In 1997 I became increasingly sceptical about the value of line-breaks
in much free verse. This article considers the possibility of dispensing with
them.

Lately I've become increasingly sceptical about the value of line-breaks
in much free verse. This article considers the possibility of dispensing with
them.

The Line between Prose and Poetry

Early in the 17th century, Campion and Milton both expressed their
dislike of jingling rhyme. As the century progressed, dramatic poetry (whose
plain verse and accomodation of speech rhythms foreshadowed free verse) "grew
even freer; with apparently incomplete lines, increased enjambment and a
recognisable degree of sprung rhythm" [Hobsbaum, 1996, p.94]. Between the 18th
and 19th centuries the trends that led to the current dominance of free-verse
were already in motion. Gradually there were more verbs than adjectives and
more subordinate than serial constructions. Form and content began to slide
apart: "to the tendency towards parenthesis, and the persistent enjambment,
Keats adds the effect of directing the sense not with the couplet, as one would
find in Pope, but against it." [Hobsbaum, 1996, p.29]

By about 1820 most of the leading poets' work was stanzaic in structure, while
a half century before it had been mostly linear. Also oblique metaphors had
taken the place of explicit similes [Miles, 1964]. During the 19th century
priorities continued to change towards grammar, semantics and speech patterns
and away from surface structure.

Rhyme, alliteration and other sound effects are still used. Witness, for
instance, this extract from a piece of recent criticism

    "Bellflowers, seldom seen now, stellar, trim."
    Note the triple statement of the el(l) sound counterpointed against 
    the duple m; the narrowing of el(l)'s vowel to ee and i - boldly 
    interrupted by recapitulation of ow; and the modulation of s through 
    st to t.

    (Of Talisman, by Peter Dale). W.G. Shepherd in Agenda 33.1

To some there's more than just sensory pleasure in this. Denise Levertov wrote
that "In organic poetry the metric movement, the measure is the direct
expression of the movement of perception. And the sounds, acting together with
the measure, are a kind of extended onomatopoeia - i.e. they imitate, not the
sounds of an experience ... but the feeling of an experience, its emotional
tone, its texture" [Denise Levertov, 1973]. But there's a limit to how much can
be expressed by such sound effects, and the primal heartbeat of iambs can dull
the senses after a while. Looking through books on poetry technique one will
see examples of alliteration and repeated vowel sounds (the mournfulness of
long 'o's or 'u's, the precision of 't's). But it's suspicious how often the
same examples are used. Pick any old poem and you're statistically likely to
find a cluster of similar sounds and it's not hard to justify the pattern - no
harder than finding patterns and meanings in tea-leaves. It's been estimated
[Wesling, 1985] that only about 1% of old poetry exploits the sound effects; in
the remaining poems the poet's inner ear has got stuck on a particular noise;
the sound and sense each going their own way. So during the twentieth century
the redundant metres and clangy rhymes were gradually removed. The remaining
sound effects stuck out, looked cheap. Many of those went too. Without metre
and rhyme, the line break became less necessary.

The consequent loss of a clear boundary between poetry and prose continues to
worry many. It's not clear why we need a carefully drawn dividing line. It's
true that poetry has had to fight to preserve its territory against
encroachment by the developing novel and everyday speech (adverts, songs,
Hallmark cards), but constructing artificial, typography-based distinctions
isn't going to help the cause - "cut-up prose" isn't accepted as poetry by much
of the reading public.

Perhaps the line is defended because prose is judged as intrinsically inferior
to poetry. One can sympathise with people who hold this view (send them
flowers?) but I suspect that their case rests on definitions of poetry and
prose that can't deal with the very texts that challenge their view (for
instance, some of Beckett's later work). And they may be saddened to learn that
Coleridge and Wordsworth spoke about the absence of an "essential difference"
between the languages of prose of verse. Valery wrote "if I were seized by a
desire to throw away rhyme and everything else...and to abandon myself
completely to the desires of my ear, I'd find no truth essential to poetry
standing in his path." Browning, Poe, Goldsmith and Coleridge all did prose
drafts of their poetry sometimes, and weren't averse to de-versing a
troublesome section of a poem-in-progress, working on it and then re-versing it
back into poetry.

Cultures vary in their attitude towards the prose/poetry divide. Some want
overt structure in their poetry, and see its loss as symptomatic of a loss of
morals or control in society as a whole. Some insist on classifying works as
(strictly) poetry or prose, thus driving works away from the grey area. Others
create new genres (prose poetry, experimental fiction) to contain the
troublesome material.

Given an isolated, unclassified text, I suspect that the following stylistic
factors are used by readers to determine whether they consider a text to be
prose or prose. Poetry is seen to have

• More surface effects (rhyme, meter, word-play, typography, and most of all,
  line-breaks)


• More specifics: "3 starlings fluttered by" rather than "Some birds flew
  by"


• More metaphor, metonymy


• Wider vocabulary: "vermilion" rather than "red"


• More obscurity, discontinuity, brevity, ambiguity


• A less hierarchical structure (webs rather than trees), fewer forms in which
  syntax provides structure - less fact, argument, narration [Fredman, 1983,
  p.128]

Prose which has some of these features is considered 'poetic'; prose with more
of these features is considered 'purple', 'experimental' or (currently most
damning of all) 'really a prose-poem'.

The Line Today

We are free of the convention that all poetry must be in a recognised form. We
don't even begin all our lines with capitals any more. Yet most of us still use
line-breaks. Indeed, the line-break for some (e.g. Hartman [Hartman, 1980], and
probably many readers of literature) is the one remaining distinguishing
feature of poetry on the page.

Because we've dispensed with so many other devices, the line-break's become if
anything overloaded with functions. The line for Hartman [Frank, 1988, p. ix]
is the primary means by which the poet is able to create and control attention.
For Frances Mayes [Frank, 1988, p. 165] it's the unit of attention (the
sentence being the unit of meaning). For Olsen it's a unit of breath.
Line-breaks can be used in place of punctuation characters. They can disrupt,
defamiliarise, build up tension, emphasise. They can show where someone reading
out the poem should pause, helping to impose the writer's intended rhythms onto
the reader so bringing the various possible rhythmic inflections into line.
More extremely, the page can be used like a canvas, the lines stuck like pieces
of a collage, or the page can be air, giving the lines room to move like the
parts of a mobile. Line-breaks also help switch the reader into poetry mode if
opening a poetry magazine or book isn't enough. Just as there's Art which is
only viable in the laboratory setting of a gallery, so there will be poems that
demand a certain frame of mind before they're considered worthy of more than a
glance, and white borders supply that frame.

One can find poems demonstrating the effectiveness of all these devices. Far
more frequent however are poems with carefully chosen words intersperced with
line-breaks which seem arbitrarily scattered. Of course, with sufficient
ingenuity one can usually concoct a reason for some of the line-breaks, but
aren't there better things for readers to concentrate upon? I wonder how
conscious present day poets are of their use of the line-break? Consider the
following stanza that begins Silos, by Rita Dove

   Like martial swans in spring paraded against the city sky's
   shabby blue, they were always too white and
   suddenly there.

I find the line-breaks distracting. The first may be there because of
the approaching right margin, but the other looks more like a conscious
decision. If the intention is to emphasise the word "suddenly" then how about
underlining it? That would be heavy-handed, but no more so than the line-
break.
Maybe it's there to surprise us. But the element of surprise wears off when, as
in this poem, the device is used so often. This element of randomness in the
positioning belongs to a different, more avant-garde kind of writing. If
line-breaks are an effective device, perhaps they should be used more
sparingly, like paragraphs. Using them at the end of each clause (as many poets
do) is a waste: the interplay of 'the line' and 'the clause' - moving them in
and out of phase - can be effective. Using line-breaks so that each stanza has
the same number of lines and all the lines have about the same length seems, on
reflection, a sentimental relic of our traditional forms. The shape poems of
Lewis Carroll and George Herbert are far more imaginatively constructed.

For many modern poets, it seems that the line break is as important as the
paragraph break in prose - if a reason for using one doesn't naturally arise
soon enough, one's just put in anyway. No-one's going to bother too much about
where they are. But in the UK at least, we daren't leave them out completely.

Letting go of the Line

In the States many twentieth century poets have tried doing without
line-breaks. W.C. Williams' early attempts (Kora in Hell:
Improvisations, 1920) opened the way for others. Acceptance was grudging
though - in 1959 Simon [Simon, 1959, p. 665] was able to say that "the prose
poem as such is with us still, but its accomplishments having been absorbed by
other genres, it has become the occasional 'aside' of writers whose essential
utterance takes other forms". Since then major poets as different as Creeley
(Presences, 1976) and Ashbery have used the form, and for a variety of
reasons

• "they had a desire to recapture for poetry modes of thought and expression
  seemingly denied it" - Fredman [Fredman, 1983, p.8].


• "Something that needs expression is not being fully released by regular
  poetry. It may simply be a time of rethinking poetry, the kind of rethinking
  that cannot be done inside of poetry for a while." - Russell Edson [11]


• "...suddenly the idea of [prose poems] occurred to me as something new in
  which the arbitrary divisions of poetry into lines would be abolished... the
  poetic form would be dissolved, in solution, and therefore create ... more of
  a surrounding thing like the way one's consciousness is surrounded by one's
  thoughts..." - Ashbery [12, p.126]

Fredman [Fredman, 1983] feels that US poets write more prose than UK ones.
Perhaps they can more appreciate the potential of prose tropes too, and can
more easily combine these with poetic tropes. Fewer European poets have escaped
from the French prose-poem genre. Even Ashbury thought that "There's something
very self-consciously poetic about French prose poetry" [12, p.126] and had to
start afresh. Zbigniew Herbert, Charles Tomlinson, John Burnside and Geoffrey
Hill are European mainstream poets who sometimes format their poetry as prose.
They can afford to - if the rest of us followed their example, it would be
received more as an affectation than an attempt to remove affectation (rather
as the use of "i" rather than "I" would be, however well-reasoned one's
argument from first principles).

The majority of poets and editors do not seem ready to accept poetry formatted
as prose - and with some justification. Donald Davie, in a different context,
put his finger on the problem when he said that "in translating rhymed verse
the rhyme is the first thing to go and metre the second; whereas the
amateur...cannot be sure of having poetry at all unless he has the external
features of it." The prose-formatted texts would have to survive without some
of the licence that poetry readers usually grant. In the UK at least, magazines
can't afford to lose any more readers by taking chances.

I've seen line-breaks used as punctuation (but what's wrong with standard
punctuation?), to control emphasis (why not italics?) and to denote a pause
(let's use Hopkins' stress marks too!). I've also seen line-breaks used
thoughtlessly. Poets often follow an "if in doubt, leave it out" policy for
words, but not for line-breaks. I think that some types of poems would be no
worse if reformatted as prose. Better, in fact, because there'd be fewer
distractions. Although I think there's a strong case for more poems to be
formatted as prose, I don't think changes will happen soon. It's the last line
of defence before poetry looks like prose, one that many dare not abandon.

References

• Benedikt (ed), "The Prose Poem: An International Anthology", Dell,
  1976.


• Russel Eldon, "The Prose Poem in America", Parnassus, 5, no 1:321-5


• Frank and Sayre, "The Line in Postmodern Poetry", University of Illinois
  Press, 1988.


• Stephen Fredman, "Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse", Cambridge
  University Press, 1983.


• Charles Hartman, "Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody", Princeton University
  Press, 1980


• P. Hobsbaum, "Metre, Rhyme and Verse Form", Routledge, 1996.


• Denise Levertov, "On the Function of the Line", in "Light up the Cave",
  New Directions, 1979.


• Denise Levertov, "Some Notes on Organic Form" in The Poet in the World,
  New Directions, 1973.


• Josephine Miles, "Eras and Modes in English Poetry", University of
  California Press, 1964.


• Clive Scott, "The Prose Poem and Free Verse", in "Modernism: A Guide to
  European Literature, 1890-1930", eds M. Bradbury and J, McFarlane, Pelican,
  1976.


• John Simon, "The Prose Poem: A Study of a Genre in Nineteenth-Century
  European Literature", Diss., Harvard University, 1959.


• T. Steele, "Missing Measures", University of Arkansis Press, 1990.


• D. Wesling, "The New Poetries", American University Press, 1985.


• "The Craft of Poetry: Interviews from 'The New York Quarterly'", Doubleday,
  1974


• "A Symposium on the Theory and Practice of the Line in Contemporary
  Poetry", (many), Epoch 29 (Winter 1980).


• Center Volume 7, (2008) has a
  "Symposium on the Line:Theory and Practice in Contemporary Poetry"


• Extravagances,
  Hesitancies, & Urgencies: On the Line in Poetry (Mark Irwin)


• "The Line" by Katy Evans-Bush in "Stress Fractures" by Tom Chivers (ed)
  (Penned in the Margins, 2010)


• "The Art of the Poetic Line", James Longenbach, Graywolf

A version of this article appeared in Acumen 29, Sep 1997