Because of its prosodic relatedness to vers libres classiques and vers libéré (qq.v.), this term is best reserved for 19th-c. Fr. free verse and those modernist free-verse prosodies that acknowledge a debt to it (e.g. the It. futurists, the Anglo-Am, vers-libristes , Pound, Eliot, and the imagists). The directions mapped out by the vers-libristes of the late 19th c have been variously explored and adapted by 20th-c. practitioners such as Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Pierre Reverdy, Éluard, Robert Desnos, René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, and Michel Deguy.
The emergence of v. 1. is specifically datable to 1886, the year in which the review La Vogue , edited by Gustave Kahn, published, in rapid succession, Rimbaud’s free-verse Illuminations , “Marine”, and “Mouvement” (possibly written in May, 1873), translations of some of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass by Jules Laforgue, Kahn’s series of poems entitled “Intermede” (to become part of his Les Palais nomades , 1887), ten of Laforgue’s own free-verse poems (later collected in his Derniers Vers , 1890) and further examples by Paul Adam and Jean Moréas. To this list of initiators, Jean Ajalbert, Édouard Dujardin, Albert Mockel, Francis Vielé-Griffin, Émile Verhaeren, Adolphe Retté, Maurice Maeterlinck, Camille Mauclair, and Stuart Merrill added their names in the years immediately following.
One might believe that the relative freedoms of vers libres classiques combined with those of vers libéré would produce the absolute freedom of v. 1., but this is not quite so. V. 1. indeed indulges in heterometricity and free-rhyming, and its lines are rhythmically unstable; but it goes further still: it rejects the indispensability of rhyme with its line-demarcative function and instead relates lineation not to number of syllables but to the coincidence of units of meaning and units of rhythm, or to integral impulses of utterance, or else simply to the optimal expressive disposition of its textual raw materials. And indeed, the vers-libristes seek to abandon the principle of syllabism itself, by making the number of syllables in a line either irrelevant or indeterminable or both. The undermining of the syllabic system is facilitated by the ambiguous syllabic status of the e atone (mute -e ) —should it be counted when unelided?—and by doubts about the syllabic value of contiguous vowels. Laforgue summarizes the tabula rasa of v. 1. in a letter to Kahn of July 1886: “I forget to rhyme, I forget about the number of syllables, I forget about stan-zaic structure.”
Paradoxically, though, syllabic amorphousness produces rhythmic polymorphousness, and polysemy; in other words, a single line of v. 1. is potentially several lines, each with its own inherited modalities. In addition, because of its heterometricity, v. 1. can maximize rhythmic shifts between lines, creating a verse-texture of multiplied tonalities. Within this paradox lies another fruitful contradiction. One of the original justifications for v. 1. was its inimitability, its resistance to abstraction and systemization; thus it could theoretically mold itself to the uniqueness of a personality, a psyche, a mood. Again Kahn: “For a long time I had been seeking to discover in myself a personal rhythm capable of communicating my lyric impulses with the cadence and music which I judged indispensable to them” (Preface to Premiers Poèmes , 1897). And yet, v. 1. equally proposes a range of rhythmic possibilities which the reader is left to resolve into any one of a number of specific recitations. Given the significance of typographical arrangement in v. 1, this contradiction might be reformulated as a polarization of the visual and the oral, of the linguistic and the paralinguistic, of the text as text, demanding to be read on its own terms, and the text as script, a set of incomplete instructions to the reader’s voice. One further contradiction might be mentioned: for all v. 1.’s ambiguation of syllabic number, with its transference of focus from syllable to accent, from number of syllables to number of measures, many free-verse poems are constructed on a “constante rythmique” (rhythmic constant), an intermittently recurrent measure which can only be defined syllabically.
Two broad currents of development can be distinguished in v. 1.: one derives its rhythmic purchase from its varying approximation to, and distance from, recognizably regular lines and often cultivates ironic modes of utterance; the other seeks to undermine the primacy of the line by promoting rhythmic units larger than the line— the verset (q.v.) or the stanza—or smaller than the line—the individual measure; this latter strain is often informed by a rhapsodic voice. But in both currents, the line’s role as guardian of metrical authority and guarantor of verse as ritual and self-transcendence is removed.
In both currents, too, the stanza finds itself without pedigree, infinitely elastic, insuring no structural continuity. The stanza of v. 1. ends not in conformity with some visible structural imperative—though who may say what invisible imperatives operate—but because a movement of utterance comes to an end, and because only by ending can a sequence of lines define its own field of structural and prosodic activity. The stanzas of v. 1. are a pursuit of unique kinds of formality constantly renewed, not the repeated confirmation of a certain stanzaic blueprint.
V. 1. can claim, with some justification, to have “psychologized” verse-structure, to have made the act of writing apparently simultaneous with the changing movements of mind: “A poem is not a feeling communicated just as it was conceived before the act of writing. Let us acknowledge the small felicities of rhyme, and the deviations caused by the chances of invention, the whole unforeseen symphony which comes to accompany the subject” (Laforge, Mélanges posthumes ). By allowing the aleatory and the improvised to inhabit verse, by exploiting the psychological layering produced by variable rhyme-interval and variable margin, by locating verse at the intersection of multiplied coordinates (rhyme, rhymelessness, repetition, the metrical, the nonmetrical), by using linguistic structures to attract and activate paralinguistic features (tempo, pause, tone, accentual variation, emotional coloring), v. 1. establishes its affinities with the stream of consciousness of contemporary fiction and proffers a stream of consciousness of poetic reading.
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