Puneet Varma (Editor)

Verbless poetry

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Verbless poetry is a field of language arts which deals with creating poems without verbs.

Attributes

The verbless poem creates a sense of arrested moment and is therefore especially appropriate to Haiku and Imagism poetic forms.

The very essence of Verbless poetry has been described as 'poetry without any dress, without ornament'.

Ezra Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro', a fourteen word poem, is an example thereof. Other examples are the impressionistic word pictures 'Storm in the evening sky' (1842) and 'Whisper, timid breathing' (1850) lyrical verbless poems of Afanasy Fet.

Otto Jespersen in his writings on the topic considered the lack of verbs gave 'a very definite impression of movement'.

References

Verbless poetry Wikipedia