Metre (poetry) - Dissent

Dissent

Not all poets accept the idea that metre is a fundamental part of poetry. 20th-century American poets Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Robinson Jeffers, were poets who believed that metre was imposed into poetry by man and not a fundamental part of its nature. In an essay titled "Robinson Jeffers, & The Metric Fallacy" Dan Schneider echoes Jeffers' sentiments: "What if someone actually said to you that all music was composed of just 2 notes? Or if someone claimed that there were just 2 colors in creation? Now, ponder if such a thing were true. Imagine the clunkiness & mechanicality of such music. Think of the visual arts devoid of not just color, but sepia tones, & even shades of gray." Jeffers called his technique "rolling stresses".

Moore went even further than Jeffers, openly declaring her poetry was written in syllabic form, and wholly denying metre. These syllabic lines from her famous poem "Poetry" illustrate her contempt for metre, and other poetic tools (even the syllabic pattern of this poem does not remain perfectly consistent):

nor is it valid

to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books": all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction

however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry

Williams tried to form poetry whose subject matter was centered on the lives of common people. He came up with the concept of the variable foot. Williams spurned traditional metre in most of his poems, preferring what he called "colloquial idioms." Another poet that turned his back on traditional concepts of metre was Britain's Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins' major innovation was what he called sprung rhythm. He claimed most poetry was written in this older rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of the English literary heritage, based on repeating groups of two or three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition. Sprung rhythm is structured around feet with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four syllables per foot, with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot.