Let’s get down to the brass and bolts of the issue, shall we! What makes a person a professional, or accomplished and well-versed in a field of knowledge? Is it luck? Is it destiny? Is it talent? Of course not! A little bit of each can help, but those even added together barely make the top of the floating tip of the iceberg. Determination and perseverance fills out the rest of the tip that lies above water, but, the thing that really matters, the greatest breadth of the work below the surface is study; reading and learning. High school prepares us for the reality that we need to learn from those that came before us in order to find a niche and succeed in it. And, if we want to succeed in a specialized field there are colleges and universities that offer degrees in those chosen branches of knowledge. So, what is it that gives a person the right to call him/herself a poet, if they don’t even know the half of it?

Granted, you don’t need a degree in carpentry to make a sturdy bookshelf. You may not need a course in mechanics to change a flat tire. Likewise, one has no need for a degree in English to know that a monotetra requires an internal rhyme to fulfill its definition. But, and this is a big but, you do need to know what you’re doing, why some things will work and others will not. You need to study how it’s been done before. How else will you know that you shouldn’t drill a piece of wood in from the bottom if you’re putting lots of books on the shelf? How else will you realize that some later models of cars require you to pry the tire outwards from the middle with your tire wrench? Likewise, how will you know that using a cliche the same way as always is a bad idea in poetry if you want to write a poem or a free verse with a fresh point of view?

Poetry is just as vast a subject as car design. And just like car designing, you need to know how to work both content and form to create an appealing and economic design. Otherwise it will not run properly.

“No true understanding of poetry can be reached until form and content are regarded as complementary and not independent.” – World’s Popular Encyclopedia, volume 7, under the heading Poetry.

Poetry: Form and Content

There have always been, and perhaps always will be, poets and philosophers of varying status who hold to either/or as the sole requirement to uphold the definition of poetry. On one end you have those who believe that rhyme and meter are what define poetry. On the other, some believe content, or subject matter alone, is the only proprietor of a good poem. This difference can be seen between Greeks and Romans. The Greek tendency, as upheld by Aristotle in Poetics, was to view content as the priority, while the Romans, as can be seen in Ars Poetica by Horace, tended to lean toward form and word-usage as that which should take precedence.

We have, however, the privilege of being able to see and understand that through the ages, the best of, and/or the most influential of, all poetry has been that which incorporated both content and form as equal components. In the English language, the sonnets of Shakespeare, the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, the odes of Keats, the ballads and epics of the Victorian Age, they all became great historical poems because of this integration, not without either.

I have stood on both sides of this debate. Mostly because I hold to the modern dramatist school of thought that both should be balanced and used not separately but complementary of each other. I have stood on the side of the Greeks because some on the Roman side claimed that content doesn’t matter. And lately, I have been fighting with the Romans, because some on the Greek side say that meter and rhyme don’t apply.

Dear poets and writing peers, must we continue this debate of old? Can we not stand on the crux of the see-saw, and stay balanced, instead of falling to either side of the issue? I implore you all to defy gravity! Don’t gravitate toward either side. Learn about forms, or if you know too much about forms and not enough about life, then learn about life and capture it in form. Either way, learn how to use both form and content; honor the parents of poetry that have led us to where we are now.

The Poem: Definition

Yeah, yeah! I know! The poem is hard to define. Or, is it? I implore you to realize that no, it is not.

Because of all that I have mentioned above, I stand on the conviction that free form and free verse are not poems. Why should they be considered poems when they have no definitive structure or meter, or rhyme scheme? It’s like saying that a van is a car, or, that a white-tail is a gazelle, or that a Russian is a Colombian. They may be from the same species, but they are not the same race. The removal of certain integral parts of a poem can be likened to taking out bits of the body. There isn’t much that you can take away without affecting its appearance, its visual or aural effect, its coherence, or its mobility. If we compare content to the heart, and form to the brain, we can see just how vital those ingredients are to the validity and consequence of our written words. Take one away and the other fails to live by itself for very long. The brain tells the heart to pump blood. The heart supplies blood for the brain. They are equally important. In this way, the poetic form relays to the content the importance of its purpose, and the content supplies purpose for the poetic form.

The definition of poem from Coles Dictionary of Literary Terms, p.149 — “A composition in metrical form, characterized by qualities of imagination, emotion, significant meaning and appropriate language. A poem may be written in rhyme, blank verse or a combination of the two, but the expression is rhythmical and designed to give aesthetic or emotional pleasure.”

Free Form: Definition

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. A poem is a written metrical verse, with or without rhyme, (mostly with) and is rhythmical and aesthetic in nature. So, basically, we’re talking about sonnets, ballads, virelays, etc., anything and everything between the monostich and the epic. So where does free form fit in? In this category?

No, because while free form has a basic rhythm and, once in a while, rhyme, it does not have a defined form. It is not a ballad, or virelay, rather something of its own nature. Hence the name free form. The poem has a definite shape, rhythm, and rhyme scheme, whereas a free form only resembles this rule slightly by having irregular meter and lazy rhyme schemes and varies from author to author. Basically, if you organize your lines into pockets of equal numbers of lines, have no control over the number of syllables per line, and rhyme with ordinary words or only when you want to, then you’re a “free form-er.”

Free Verse: Definition

The movers of the vers libre (free verse) wave consider content to be more important to poetry than any other component. But, like I said above, that is not the case as proved to us by Shakespeare and Keats. So, what happened? Why is there such a thing as free verse? Let’s just remember that this form is not a new one; Psalms and Songs of Solomon were written in free verse.

In order to get at the core of this issue, let’s harken back to an earlier statement. In paragraph seven, I said “The removal of certain integral parts of a poem can be likened to taking out bits of the body.” Free verse, at its root, is a heightened form of content that has no form. It’s effect is largely based on capturing an emotional or highly imaginative instance using sharp imagery and sensory detail. It’s very much like, according to my previous assessment, a heart without a brain. That may sound base, but the relativity stands firm.

It is because of this assessment that I affirm the laziness of modern writers, and instead of calling them poets, I call them “free verse-ers”. Writing free verse allows a writer to write without concern for form or rules. It is my assertion that through this laziness, this inattention to the rules of the poem, that most modern-day writers do not want to take the time to learn their craft. They want instant results, hence the need to be free from formal constraints. This modernist approach is too impatient.

The definition of free verse from Merriam Websters Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Ed. “Verse whose meter is irregular in some respect or whose rhythm is not metrical.”

Those Who Came Before

“Writing traditional poetry is too hard.” I heard one person say. And yet, she hadn’t even given it a try. “I don’t like sonnets, they’ve got too many rules.” I heard another. And yet, sonnets are one of the easiest forms to write.

I don’t care too much for sonnets myself, but, my point is, if you want to write a poem, stop writing free verse. If you want to write poetry, then show some appreciation to those poets who brought poetry into the twentieth century and made it popular. Thomas Hardy, E. J. Pratt, T. S. Elliot, and many more whose roots began in the Victorian Age, laid the foundation for free-verse-ers today. Don’t deny them what is properly theirs: respect. Before the free verse became popular these people studied their craft and learned from those that came before them. Do yourself a favor and learn from them.

To get you started on the road to forms of poetry, here is a few links that you can bookmark and look through when you take the time. Don’t be daunted; this is where you want to be to learn something about your craft. Take up your torch and discover something new to you. You just might find something you like.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Poetic_form
• http://www.onelook.com/?w=poetry&ls=a
• http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display_rpo/poetterm.cfm