6 x 9. 320 pgs. (1996) Paper 978-0-472-08565-1 $25.95S  Available Add to Cart Search this Book's Content About the Book Praise Subjects Literary Studies--British and Irish Literatures / Literary Studies--European Literature / Literary Studies--Poetry and Poetry Criticism

The Origins of Free Verse

H. T. Kirby-Smith



Argues that free verse has deep historical roots, and traces them, from Milton to contemporary poetry

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About the Book

H. T. Kirby-Smith offers a far-ranging and intellectually engaging study of the literary history of the debated genre of free verse, aimed not at perpetuating a particular dispute but instead at discovering the generative points of this often celebrated, often maligned form.

Though free verse became a dominant poetic mode only in the twentieth century, Kirby-Smith finds its roots in seventeenth-century England. Beginning his study with writers such as John Milton—who was considered by T. S. Eliot to be the greatest writer of free verse in English—the author places recent and divisive topics in poetics in context, showing them to be attenuated remnants of issues first broached hundreds of years ago.

The book seeks to establish a consensus on the nature of free verse, with reference to critics and poets including Pound, Eliot, Williams, Amy Lowell, Yvor Winters, and Hugh Kenner. Good free verse, argues Kirby-Smith, arises as a reaction to a well-established set of conventions. Likewise, The Origins of Free Verse goes against the conventions of existing poetic scholarship, offering an encompassing yet fres—and controversial—-literary history of free verse.

H. T. Kirby-Smith is Professor of English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.