Why Meter Is Not Essential to Poetry

Contra Robert Charboneau

Two days ago,

Robert Charboneau

posted an essay titled Why Use Meter in Poetry, where he discussed the nature of meter and free verse in the art of poetry. A while back, I wrote about free verse and why I side with T. S. Eliot, who said “the division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist.” Naturally, Robert’s post provoked a few thoughts. Before I dive into those, I’ll just say: this is a response meant in good humor, for the sake of continuing a conversation about art. His original post is well-researched and thoughtful (as all his writing is), he’s a great poet in his own right, and when it comes to poetry—and even this essay—I agree with him more than I disagree. (But more on that at the end.)

That being said, I have a few quibbles with his essay. So let’s talk about that.

Robert opens his essay with a fascinating quote from T. S. Omond: “The first necessity felt by the poet is apparently to use his words as indices of time.” He then claims that poetry “has largely abandoned meter”, to its “detriment”, adding that “[although] there is still good work being done” (emphasis mine), “the public’s primary relationship to poetry is still through that of free verse. From these opening remarks, it seems like Robert’s position is that:

1. Contemporary poets rarely employ meter.

2. Contemporary poets should employ meter more than they do.

3. Free verse, or at least the most common example of free verse, which defines “the public’s primary relationship to poetry”, is not good work. In a less pedantic reading, we can assume that what he actually meant was: “Although there is still good work being done in the study and application of meter, the public’s primary relationship to poetry is still that of free verse.” Nevertheless, unless I’m wholly mistaken, Robert’s intention with his opening paragraph is to set up a contrast between metered poetry and free verse: meter is abandoned, but valuable, while free verse is common…and needs to budge from its apparently cemented position and give metered poetry a little more elbow room on the bookshelf.

At no point in his essay does Robert go so far as to say that free verse “isn’t really poetry”, but this stance pervades some circles. Free verse may have the mainstream poetry market in its grip, but at least in among the classical education/Great Tradition/old school humanities crowd, it’s hip and trendy to say that poetry “isn’t really poetry” if it’s not metered.

So, while Robert doesn’t explicitly make this point (at least not by my reading of his essay), in my response, I also want to discuss the claim that:

4. Free verse isn’t “true poetry.”

Moving on, Robert then quotes Owen Barfield on how “the old rhythmic human consciousness of Nature…lives on as the tradition of metrical form.” In other words: Nature is itself inherently rhythmic. (Think of the seasons, the cycle of constellations, the rest periods of night between day, etc.) We feel that and participate in it. And metrical form is the “tradition” by which this sense of the rhythms of Nature endures within us.

So far, I agree with everything that Robert has said and referenced. I would agree that poetry is “words [used as] indices of time”, and I love the thought that poetry is the rhythms of Nature sinking into the “bones” of human consciousness, as it were. But when Barfield says “metrical form” and Robert says “the metrical line”, I assume they’re both referring to metered poetry: poetry that uses a consistent pattern of metrical “feet”, such as iambic pentameter. (Robert seemingly plays with this definition of meter later in his essay; I’ll get there.)

Robert’s line of argument so far seems to be: 1) metered poetry is rare and overlooked, 2) meter is an ancient part of poetry, and 3) meter is such an old part of poetry that it stems from our relationship to Nature and rhythm. But then he describes how children learn this rhythm. He says:

“Meter was our first contact with Nature and with consciousness. Indeed, before we could fit words to sense, we heard rhythm, the rhythm of the people around us speaking. As infants we desired to find a pattern in what they said, a regularity by which we could make sense out of things. Our parents helped us along by speaking to us in patterns. They made alliterative sounds. Ba-ba. Ma-ma. They sang to us in nursery rhymes using all manner of tones.”

But hang on. He’s just shifted here from talking about “metrical form”/ “meter” to the natural rhythms of speech. Obviously, the two are connected, and the first stems from the second. But what he’s said here is: 1) meter is our first contact with Nature (which is different from what Barfield says; he merely claims that it’s an ancient and living example of our contact with Nature’s rhythm, not that it’s our “first” contact), and that 2) either we learn meter itself, or we learn Nature’s rhythms (I’m not quite sure which he means here), by hearing the pattern of speech as children, through alliteration, rhyme, singing, etc.

But not all patterns of speech are meter (ie, as we said earlier, “a consistent pattern of metrical feet”). When I talk to my Mom about my day, I’m not speaking in strict trochees or anapests. To put it in old-school logic textbook format: All [patterns of speech] are not [meter]. Therefore, meter is an example of the rhythm of speech, and rhythms of speech are an example of the rhythm of nature, but the converse statements are not true.

Or, in Venn diagram format:

Therefore, the natural rhythms of speech may teach us meter (whole to part), and they may teach us the rhythms of Nature (part to whole), but they may also teach us the rhythms of nature without teaching us meter. I’m harping on this point because free verse also relies on the natural patterns inherent in speech. In fact, it relies MORE on natural speech patterns than metered poetry, because it borrows its rhythms from conversation—ie, speech—without employing a set pattern. So if—as Robert argues—the conversations and lullabies we hear as a child both teach us meter and teach us to appreciate the rhythmic, patterned quality of life itself, then free verse can also teach us us to inhabit and embody this rhythmic quality of nature.

Robert continues in his essay with this statement:

“[The] regularity inherent in the metrical line is an attempt by the first peoples on Earth to make sense of their words. The poets did great things with it. Poetry made use of meter to great effect until about only a century ago.”

What Robert overlooks here is that although poetry has “made use of meter to great effect” throughout history, it has not done so in the same way in every language. He touches on the difference between quantitative and qualitative meter later in his essay, and I’ll address his comments there later on, but it’s important to note that although meter has been “[used] to great effect” for so many centuries, it has not been used to the same effect in every time and place.

If we just look at English poetry, we can divide it into three stages.

1. Old English poetry, which uses alliterative meter. Alliterative meter is defined by a range of stress (heavy stress, medium stress, lighter stress), a set number of beats (not syllables!) per line, and the use of alliteration to denote the beats.

2. Middle English poetry. I’m less familiar with this, but I’d assume that the influence of French from the Norman conquest played a role in changing the way that English poetry operated. For example: ME poetry uses more consistent meter and rhyme than OE, and stanzaic forms like the ballad became more common.

3. Modern English poetry (excluding free verse). Modern English dates from the 1400s, so this encompasses everything from Shakespeare to Auden. Modern English poetry uses qualitative meter (stress and unstress), often with rhyme.

What Robert seems to be arguing for in his essay is a return to the qualitative meter of Modern English poetry, pre the vers libre movement. Again, I’m basing all of this off his opening comments about the lack of meter in the contemporary poetry scene; usually, when people are talking about meter or lack of meter in modern (English) poetry, they mean qualitative meter.

What’s funny is that free verse actually jumps back in time and borrows a great deal of influence from Old English poetry and from alliterative meter. In free verse, because you don’t have a consistent meter, you have to create unity and emphasis in your poem with other techniques. The most common free verse techniques are consonance and assonance (consonant repetition or vowel repetition), repetition of phrase, and change in beats between lines.¹ The use of repeated sound, repeated phrase, and a “beat” based rhythm, rather than a set meter, are all characteristics of alliterative verse.²

Take “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver.

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

“You” “do” “good” “You” “do” “walk” “knees” are all long, slow vowel sounds, with “swallowed” consonants: the soft “d” in “good”, the “k” in “walk” that’s tempered by the “l”. The first two lines are all short, simple words of one syllable, until the interruption of “hundred”, which is both multi-syllabic and a more staccato sound than we’ve heard yet, telling us—by the mere sound of it—that a new idea has been introduced. Same thing with the sibilant “desert” and “repenting”, where we reach three syllables for the first time in the poem, at the close of the third line. The repeated use of “meanwhile” mirrors the Old English “hwæt”, drawing our attention back to the text for a further development.³ Lastly, Oliver moves between long, spun-out lines—“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine”, “Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain”, “Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air”—and short, sparse ones— “Meanwhile the world goes on”, “are moving across the landscapes”, “are heading home again”—to create an antiphonal back-and-forth that echoes how the poem postures itself as a question-and-answer with the reader, an effect created by varying the beats in each line.⁴

So Robert wants us to return to a use of meter in poetry, but only specific metric conventions from a specific point in time. Perhaps we could make the point that, with his clear bias towards qualitative meter over alliterative meter, Robert simply prefers his English poetry diluted by the waters of French influence, instead of at its full Germanic potency—and with a last name like “Charboneau”, who’s surprised?⁵

For his next point, Robert claims:

“Poets largely abandoned it because it had become too rigid. It was overoptimized. It became a failure of its own success. Robbed of that original rhythm, it was replaced by an artificial one over centuries of refinement. Our greatest poets rightly discarded it because it had become lifeless and mechanical. They turned instead to free verse, to be able to say things in such a way that they would once again feel alive.”

I’d like to see some sources for this, because as far as I can tell, this is an incomplete historical assessment. I’m not familiar enough with the French literary tradition to trace the influence of poets like Rimbaud on the vers libre movement, but if we take four of the English free verse poets—Whitman, Arnold, Pound, and Eliot—then Robert’s analysis applies only in part to Whitman, and not at all to the last three.

Granted, Whitman’s poetry discards meter in favor of varying cadences, in part out of a desire to express both freedom and contradiction (“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)”). But Whitman was certainly capable of writing in meter, as seen in perhaps his most famous and best loved poem “Oh Captain! My Captain!” As regards the rest of Whitman’s poetry, it may not scan, but it is certainly rhythmic.⁶

When it comes to Matthew Arnold, I find it hard to believe that the godson of John Keble, whose work The Christian Year defined a generation of English poetry and devotion, saw meter as merely “lifeless and mechanical.” Arnold was elected to the Oxford Chair of Poetry after Keble, and he would surely have encountered his predecessor’s lectures on poetic theory, which were deeply concerned—as were all Keble’s writing—with a love of the poetic tradition. But Arnold also experiments with and anticipates free verse. Take his poem Dover Beach.

As for Ezra Pound, I’m again not well-versed in his poetry enough to say whether Robert’s analysis holds out here or not. I’ll only cite a few remarks from his essay “A Retrospect” that I found interesting.

“To begin with, consider the three propositions (demanding direct treatment, economy of words, and the sequence of the musical phrase), not as dogma—never consider anything as dogma—but as the result of long contemplation, which, even if it is some one else’s contemplation, may be worth consideration.”

“Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as an average piano teacher spends on the art of music.”

“Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Do’t think any intelligent person is going to be decieved when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.”⁷

(That last comment about “chopping your composition into line lengths” reads like a warning against the kind of “Instapoetry” that Robert himself mentions in his essay.)

Lastly, regarding Eliot, the best I can do is merely to link his own essay on vers libre, which is the definitive statement, in my opinion. A few key quotes:

“Vers libre has not even the excuse of a polemic; it is a battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art. And as the so-called vers libre which is good is anything but ‘free’, it can better be defended under some other label.”

“If vers libre is a genuine verse-form it will have a positive definition. And I can define it only in negatives: (1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence of metre.

The third of these qualities is easily disposed of. What sort of a line that would be which would not scan at all I cannot say. Even in the popular American magazines, whose verse columns are now largely given over to vers libre, the lines are usually explicable in terms of prosody. Any line can be divided into feet and accents.”

“Scansion tells us very little. It is probable that there is not much to be gained by an elaborate system of prosody, but the erudite complexities of Swinburnian metre. With Swinburne, once the trick is perceived and the scholarship appreciated, the effect is somewhat diminished. When the unexpectedness, due to the unfamiliarity of the metres to English ears, wears off and is understood, one ceases to look for what one does not find in Swinburne; the inexplicable line with the music which can never be recaptured in other words…But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.”⁸

All of these poets were clearly not only masters of the craft of poetry, but also deeply passionate about it: poetry was not “rigid”, “artificial”, “lifeless” or “mechanical” for them. And yet all of them chose to use free verse.

As another note: looking back on modernist artistic movements, we often paint them in sweeping strokes as motivated by “self-expression” or “extreme individualism.” That may be part of the story, but movements like Futurism, Cubism, twelve-tone music, or the vers libre movement were motivated in part by a radical detachment of form from expression—artists were interested in examining form, without considering the ordinary feelings of an audience or ordinary subject matter, and pushing it to extremes. What can music do? What can color do? Modernist artists were more obsessed with form than your average guy who wrote sonnets in the sixteenth century: they wanted pure form, often without reference to human experience. They were criticized for that shocking approach at the time; nowadays, we usually accuse them of the opposite.

Moving on, Robert then says that “[meter] restores a sense of objectivity to poetry, and for an art that has been swallowed up by subjectivity, this should come as a welcome salve.”

This is an interesting point, and I think meter certainly feels objective to an audience unfamiliar with it, because it feels old. However, I think poets like John Donne, George Herbert, and George Macdonald would also consider meter a vehicle for extremely subjective poetry (particularly devotional), while Aristotle says the unique quality of poetry is its ability to express the universal through specifics.⁹ Ideally, a poem opens the objective through the subjective, by writing about a specific experience in a way that can be universally accessed.

In Robert’s next section, “On Free Verse Today”, he gives a rather bleak picture of the state of free verse. I had a few issues with this section.

1. First, he notes that most people nowadays find poetry inaccessible, as well as “[impenetrable], esoteric, solipsistic, [and] inconclusive.” He then claims that “[it’s] no coincidence that such frustrations correlate with the advent of free verse in modernism and the abandoning of regularity and unity in verse.” Then, a mere two paragraphs later, he goes on to say that “Those that do read find they are not able to say much about a poem besides ‘That one really moved me,’ or ‘How powerful, how deep.’ For if poetry is merely expression, than it has reduced itself to being read by only the most emotional and least serious readers. Hence the rise of Instapoetry outside of academia.” So which is it? Is free verse esoteric and impenetrable, or is it relegated to the mere schmaltzy emotionalism of a Rupi Kaur? Surely the second is comprehensible, if not deep, and the first is complex, if not accessible. So is free verse responsible for both contradicting faults? And what about all the poets in between—like Mary Oliver or Denise Levertov—who write free verse that people love, without finding it either inaccessible or cheap?

2. Secondly, Robert narrates a story about a free verse defendant who claimed that poetry had no definition at all. While it certainly illustrates his point, it seems like an extreme example, given that there are free verse poets who could—and would—offer a definition of poetry and an understanding of the craft. I’m not saying his man is made of straw, but surely he could’ve picked a fairer opponent—like say, Eliot.

In the next section, “Has Poetry Outgrown Meter?”, Robert examines a section from Barfield that traces the movement from prose to verse. I’m not going to dig into his thoughts here as much, but I do think that Barfield’s point about “the increasing aesthetic value of sound, as against mere time” is interesting, given that music has largely replaced poetry as our cultural medium of expression. Robert’s read the original source though, and I haven’t, so I’ll defer to his analysis here.

In this section, Robert also claims that meter is “the essential element of verse.” I’m going to get philosophical and nitpicky for a second. To call something the “essential element” of anything means that it is the “sine qua non” of that thing—the element “without which” you lose all definition of the thing. In the definition “man is a rational animal”, “rational” is the essential element: if man is not “rational”, there is no specific difference to set him apart from all other animals, and you have no way of delineating what is and isn’t man. If meter is the essential element of verse, then everything inside the category of meter is verse, and everything outside its bounds isn’t.

Here’s another Venn diagram.

“Meter” is the boundary that separates verse from “not-verse”, ie, other types of literature.

But if that’s the case, then what is free verse? To me, it seems unreasonable to claim that it’s not poetry, given that people—ordinary people with ordinary tastes, not the kind of people who’ve trained themselves to listen to twelve-tone music—react to vers libre as poetry: which is to say, they find in it a heightened, figured expression of their own human thoughts and feelings.

Rather than arguing that poetry is not really free verse, it makes more sense to argue that free verse is not really free, as Eliot does: that is, that while it may not employ a set metrical pattern, it certainly does employ rhythm and patterned sound. What makes Robert’s essay so interesting is that in his final sections, he moves away from defining meter as a set pattern of feet, to defining it as a kind of musicality over time—which is the exact same movement that the original vers libre poets followed.

He opens his thoughts on “What is Meter?” with an excellent definition of poetry. Robert says:

“[Poetry] is a unique sort of speech. It is heightened language, ornate and set apart from regular language. Poetry is figured language. It is language whose primary purpose is to figure, to form in the imagination those things that would make reality apparent, clear, and meaningful.”

To which I say 1) I wholeheartedly agree and 2) nothing about that definition excludes free verse.

He goes on to say that:

“Meter is the pattern given to the poem as a whole. It is the measure of its lines such that, when reading, one recognizes an underlying regularity which fosters uniformity.”

He also cites this remarkable quote from Charles Williams:

“In verse the reader is deliberately referred to a chosen measure; in prose he is not so referred. That reference—whether it be to the normal decasyllabic line of traditional blank verse, or any one among our innumerable stanzaic forms, or the couplet, or even to a deliberate irregularity—is made known to him by the verse itself, and is ostentatiously insisted on by the verse itself. The ostentation is a part of the verse. It is a necessary part of verse that one line should be a vivid conditioning of the next, and that on arriving at the next, the reader should remain vividly aware of that past power thus conditioning him.”¹⁰

Interesting to note that Williams includes “a deliberate irregularity” among the chosen measures to which a poet can refer; to me, that sounds like free verse.¹¹

Robert adds that generally we think that this “underlying regularity” is created by patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. However, a few paragraphs down, he says—in line with Eliot—that the scansion of stressed and unstressed syllables results from “the overanalysis of verse” and that theorists who are obsessed with metrical analysis “lack an understanding of those elementary principles that a general public both intuits when reading and desires in the art of poetry.” So then what does Robert think the study of meter should look like, as poets seek to recover this lost technique?

In the second to last section, “What Measure Should be Taken”—which name I dearly hope is a pun—Robert again quotes Omond as saying,

“Measurements are held to depend on time-periods rather than syllables, while the function of accent becomes mainly directive and illuminative.^”

Robert and Omond make the point that instead of counting syllables to understand a poem’s meter, we should listen to “the time signature of the line”, for poetry depends on “temporal movement.” Robert advocates for a return to an understanding of meter that is “intuitive and acquired by listening to and not rigidly systematizing poetry.” He even makes the point that an understanding of meter based on “periodicity”, like Omond’s, can account “for a progression of accent (what he calls an increase in pressure) as opposed to a traditional understanding of accent as binary (stressed/unstressed).”

To which point, I’ll again quote Eliot: “[The] ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse.”¹²

The conclusion of my diatribe, then, is actually not that I disagree with Robert. I think we’re very much on the same page about what constitutes poetry. His final thoughts approach very nearly what has always been my working definition of poetry, taken from Perrine’s Sound and Sense: that poetry is “patterned sound.” I also agree with Robert that more poets should study meter, that it is overlooked, that it is valuable, that it imparts to us the rhythms of Nature, that it is certainly the trunk of the poetic tradition, though not the only branch. Where I disagree with Robert—and perhaps it’s not even a disagreement, simply an extension of his argument, as vers libre is not anti-meter, but another form of it—is simply about the relationship between metered poetry and free verse. To that end, I find that his essay fails as a defense of metered poetry against free verse, but succeeds triumphantly as a defense of poetry, and as a call to poets to lovingly dedicate themselves to all tools and aspects of their craft.

At the end of the day, I don’t think the distinction between good and bad verse is meter: I think it’s the willingness of the poet to submit himself to the demands of the poem, as it requires from him all at once an understanding of and ability to wield diverse tools, such as imagery, concision, and, to Robert’s point, rhythm and musicality.

I’ll end this essay in the worst way a writer can: by quoting myself. From my previous essay on free verse:

“[In] writing, you can do something badly for the right reasons, you can do something well for the wrong reasons, and you can do something well for the right reasons. Only the third is masterful. But crossing borders can be an act of irreverence or one of exploration; any act of play requires both rules and levity in how we handle them. Free verse, at its best, is free because its poet knows his cosmography so well that he is, in Dante’s language, “crowned and mitered lord of himself”, which is to say, of his craft, his creativity, and its employ. Or, to borrow from Eliot again: “We conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos.”

1. Speaking only of aural, or sound-based, techniques. Imagery, conceit, metaphor, personification etc. are also poetic techniques, but they have more to do with the operation of the mind than the senses.

2. I’d also argue that the “spectrum” of stress from heavy to light applies in free verse as well.

3. Seamus Heaney, in the introduction to his translation of Beowulf, has a great note about how he chose to translate “Hwæt” as “So” because that was the “tell” word of his Irish relatives that they had a story or important idea to share. Another example of common patterns of speech cropping up in poetry.

4. She also often employs caesuras in her longer lines, which is another convention of alliterative verse.

5. This is a joke.

6. I’ve heard before that a lot of it is inspired by the rhythms of the King James Bible, but don’t have a scholarly source for that particular idea.

7. Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” Pavannes and Divisions, 1918

8. Eliot, ‘Reflections on Vers libre’, New Statesman, 3 March 1917.

9. Aristote, Poetics, trans. Malcom Heath (London, England: Penguin Books Ltd, 1996), 16.

10. “The Ostentation of Verse.” Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind. Wipf & Stock. p. 3, via. Robert Charboneau’s essay.

11. The part about how “one line should be a vivid conditioning of the next, and that on arriving at the next, the reader should remain vividly aware of that past power thus conditioning him” also sounds a lot like the free verse practice of “line intention”, where each line is either a subversion or a fulfillment of the preceding one.

12. Eliot, ‘Reflections on Vers libre’ again.