A term coined by William Carlos Williams which he first associated with the triadic stanzas of his Paterson 2.3 (1948), later reprinted separately as “The Descent.” Claiming that the concept of the foot had to be altered to suit a newly relativistic world, Williams insisted that the v. f. allowed both order and variability in so-called free verse (q.v.), which he maintained never could be truly free. The v. f., he asserted, supplanted the fixed foot of traditional Eng. prosody in order to represent more accurately the speech rhythms of the modern Am. idiom. Attempting to demonstrate his measurement of the v. f., Williams explained that he counted “a single beat” for each line of his three-line stanzas so as to regulate the “musical pace” of his verse, though in fact his lines contain varying numbers of stresses and syllables. But, as his nine-poem sequence “Some Simple Measures in the Am. Idiom and the V. F.” (1959) shows, Williams did not consistently identify the v. f. with the triadic stanza form. Because his own explanations of the device often lack precision and consistency, subsequent critics have questioned sharply the legitimacy of the concept of the v. f., one remarking that the v. f. in verse is as impossible as a variable inch on a yardstick; a more promising approach to Williams’ prosody lies in treating it as visual. Edgar Allan Poe had earlier used the term to describe the caesura; for Poe, the caesura was “a perfect foot” the length of which would vary in accordance with the time it takes to pronounce other feet in the line. Williams read Poe’s essays on prosody, which apparently influenced his conception of verse structure.—E. A. Poe, “The Rationale of Verse”, Complete Works , ed. J. A. Harrison, v. 14 (1902); W. C. Williams, Letter to R. Eberhart (May 23, 1954), Sel. Letters , (1957), I Wanted to Write a Poem , ed. E. Heal (1958), “The Am. Idiom”, Interviews with W C. Williams , ed. L. Wagner (1976); H. M. Sayre, The Visual Text of W. C Williams (1983); S. Cush-man, W. C. Williams and the Meanings of Measure (1985).
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