Visual Form in Free Verse

Abstract

Visual form performs numerous significant and diverse functions in modern free verse poetry. The theoretical pronouncements of such poets as Robet Creeley, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky recognize only its function of scoring for performance and often belittle its significance. In representative works of these poets, however, we find lineation, line-grouping, spatial arrangement and particular graphological details operating both globally and locally to make meaning and to compose text. Even though opsis has been, since Aristotle, an acknowledged element of literary art, not only practitioners, but with certain exceptions, literary critics and theorists have failed to assign it more than a subordinate, supportive role. Historical approaches that privilege sound because of the originally oral nature of poetry are of little help in explaining the use of visual form in modern free verse. A functional approach, entailing careful attention to how visual form affects our experience of printed poems, can contribute toward developing "a theory of graphic prosody" such as John Hollander has called for. Functional analysis of visual form in representative free verse poems and passages yields a dozen distinct functions—rhetorical, mimetic and aesthetic functions that tend to support the illusion of the poem as unified and autonomous, and on the other hand, an equal number of functions that tend to be distintegrative and intertextual. Analysis of a passage from Pound’s Cantos, using these functions as an analytical tool, shows that visual form helps realize this modern long poem’s simultaneous drive toward coherence and impulse toward openness.