Freedom, Not Correctness, in Poetry

(Picture Credit - WritingIsMyHobby by Publishing Guru)

When I was in my teens I spent much of my writing-energy in trying to compose perfectly correct verses. Iambic pentameters, sonnets, I tried all sorts of forms. It was so frustrating when my words sounded good but weren't fully iambic or whatever.

Yet just a glance around the net today on verse-forms confirms that I was largely wasting my time. The more we look, the more clear it becomes that it is not “correctness” that counts, but “Variety”.

A few years back I got slammed on a literature forum for writing verse that was “Wrong!” However, I am even more convinced now that the variations I used, such as the odd shorter line (or “verse”) were quite effective. It was those “Correctness Nazis” who were “wrong”.

Even basic sources such as Wiki and the “Cummings Guide” show that variety is the spice of verse and poetry. (I have always distinguished between verse and poetry, though the two things can of course be combined).

I personally prefer to write in free verse. However, I do employ iambic and other rhythms or metres quite a lot. This is just like using “tools” such as rhyme, assonance, alliteration and metaphor.

Variety in metre is used well by Shakespeare no less. “Richard III” opens:

“Now is the winter of our discontent.”

Read this out and you will find that the first foot is inverted, to stress the first word. In Hamlet he starts boldly but ends in a more uncertain, “feminine” way (deliberately) with:

“To be or not to be, that is the question.”

Sometimes Shakespeare abandons the iambic rhythm and uses the very opposite (“Trochaic” metre):

“Double, double, toil and trouble”

Another great poet, Tennyson, makes good use of another metre, Dactyl metre. This has the first syllable accented and the second and third unaccented:

“Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley'd and thunder'd”

One final example of a variation in metre –

Anapest meter has the first two syllables unaccented and the third syllable accented. A quote from Byron:

“And the sound l of a voice l that is still 

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold”

Just switching from iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line) to iambic tetrameter (8 syllables) can make your verse more passionate or more like a nursery rhyme (depending on your content). Wordsworth provides a fine example of tetrameter with:

“I wandered lonely, as a cloud”

I could go on, but this should suffice. Yes, the more I look at all this, the more I feel inclined to stick with free verse. Why be tied down to some dogma? All those poetic techniques are out there to be used. But first of all, you have to have something to say. Or be compelled to say it.

Paul Butters  

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