Vers libre is an open form of poetry that abandons consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or other forms of musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.
Contents
Prefatory
Vers libre is a poetic form of flexibility, complexity and naturalness created in the late 19th century in France, in 1886, largely through the activities of La Vogue, a weekly journal founded by Gustave Kahn, and the appearance of a band of poets unequalled at any one time in the history of French poetry, the ‘Counter-Romanticism’ led by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Laforgue, Corbière, concerned with synaethesis (the harmony or equilibrium of sensation) later described as ‘the moment when French poetry began to take consciousness of itself as poetry’. Gustave Kahn was commonly supposed to have invented the term Vers libre and according to F. S. Flint 'was undoubtedly the first theorist of the techniques'. Later in 1912, Robert de Souza published his conclusion on the genre 'that a vers libre was possible which would keep all the essential characteristics of vers classique, but would free it from the encumbrances which usage had made appear indispensable'. Thus the practice of verse libre was not the abandoning of pattern, but the creation of an original and complicated metrical form for each poem.
The formal stimuli for vers libre were vers libéré (French verse of the late 19th century that liberated itself from classical rules of versification whilst observing the principle of isosyllabism and regular patterned rhyme), and vers libre classique (a minor French genre of the 17th and 18th century which conformed to classic concepts, but in which lines of different length were irregularly and unpredictable combined), and vers populaire (versification derived from oral aspects of popular song). Remy de Gourmont's Livre des Masques gave definition to the whole vers libre movement, noting there should arise, at regular intervals, a full and complete line, which reassures the ear and guides the rhythm.
Form and structure
The unit of vers libre is not the foot, the number of the syllables, the quantity, or the line. The unit is the strophe, which may be the whole poem, or only a part. Each strophe is a complete circle. in vers libre ‘verse-formal based upon cadence that allows the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader’.
Unrhymed cadence in vers libre is built upon 'organic rhythm,' or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system. for vers libre addresses the ear not the eye. Vers libre is liberated from traditional rules concerning metre, caesura and line end stopping, every syllable pronounced is of nearly equal value but is less strongly accented than in English, being less intense requires less discipline to mold the accents into the poem's rhythm. This new technique as defined by Kahn consisted of the denial of a regular number of syllables as the basis for versification, the length of line is long and short, oscillating with images used by the poet following the contours of his or her thoughts and is free rather than regular.
Legacy
Vers libre, until 1912, had hardly been heard of outside France until T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint shared their knowledge thereof in 1909 with the Poets Club in London which later became the heart of the Imagist movement and through Flint's advocacy of the genre and thus vers libre influenced Imagism in the discovery of new forms and rhythms.
Imagism, in the wake of French Symbolism ( i.e. vers libre of French Symbolist poets, was the wellspring out of which the main current of Modernism in English flowed, which T. S. Eliot later identified as ‘the point de repere usually taken as the starting point of modern poetry’, as hundreds of poets were led to adopt vers libre as their medium.