We have come a long way since the standard heroic couplet—two successive lines of rhymed iambic pentameter. Prose is defined in my dictionary as “Ordinary speech or writing, without metrical structure” or “Commonplace expression or quality.” Interestingly, making an intransitive verb of the word changes the definition to “To speak or write in a dull, tiresome style.” Amazingly, the definition for free verse is somewhat the same, “Refers to poetry that does not follow a prescribed form but is characterized by the irregularity in the length of lines and the lack of a regular metrical pattern and rhyme. Free verse may use other repetitive patterns instead (like words, phrases, structures).” The key here is that free verse still resembles poetry in structure and not like a regularly written paragraph. The definition of verse almost always has the root word “meter” somewhere in it, and meter is a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, is considered the innovator of blank verse. Blank verse is any unrhyming verse, usually iambic pentameter.
Blank verse: from "The Light of Asia" by Sir Edwin Arnold:
And brooding on the empty eggs of thought,
The shadow of this fate, too vast for man,
May fade, belike, and I shall see him grow
To that great stature of fair sovereignty
When he shall rule all lands - if he will rule -
Heroic Couplet:
“So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”—Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
The only difference between blank verse and heroic couplet is that blank verse does not have end rhyme—they have the same metrical style. This brings us to meter. An “iamb” is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. A “dactylic” is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. A “trochee” is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable and an “anapest” is two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. A “metrical foot” is the combination of these syllables in a line to make up the meter.
I think the most amazing part of Leaves of Grass, of Song of Myself, is near the end when Whitman says:
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
The first two lines here have no meter and could be read as prose, except for a memorable third line “And filter and fibre your blood.” This last line is almost completely dactylic and this is because he is talking to us in this stanza, but he especially wants us to remember and feel this line. So in effect, he uses meter for specific purposes only.
For a work to grow “organically,” it means that it has become its own entity. It’s true that a poem like “I sing the body electric” mimics the organic structure of the body, but Leaves of Grass became its own body. It grew as Whitman did and the country did. When Reconstruction was failing, it was necessary to add poems to that effect, since Leaves of Grass was supposed to be the fiber of every American. If Whitman were still alive, Leaves of Grass would now be thousands of pages long. This mimics the fact that there are thousands of pages that would be added by every American. He had a plan, and it was the growing of America, which is an entity itself as well.
Works Cited
Poetry definitions. http://virtual.park.uga.edu/cdesmet/class/engl4830/work/projects/brent/alphadef.htm#V. 8 September 2005.
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