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Breathe Perfection

Beautiful lines from a D.H Lawrence essay that explains why free verse exists and what purpose it is meant to serve

But in free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment. To break the lovely form of metrical verse, and to dish up the fragments as a new substance, called vers libre, this is what most of the free-versifiers accomplish. They do not know that free verse has its own nature, that it is neither star nor pearl, but instantaneous like plasm. It has no goal in either eternity. It has no finish. It has no satisfying stability, satisfying to those who like the immutable. None of this. It is the instant; the quick; the very jetting source of all will-be and has-been. The utterance is like a spasm, naked contact with all influences at once. It does not want to get anywhere. It just takes place.

There seems to be the implication once perfection is achieved in the romanticized past or yet to come future which can be perfected by our imagination, there is an expectation of metered verse. The Iliad and the Odyssey deserve metered verse. This made me wonder about one of my favorite books of all time - Vikram Seth's Golden Gate - a highly metered form of poetry but set in the present. Maybe that is greatness - when poet can bring the two opposing forces together and bind what is transient into meter to breathe perfection where none can naturally exist following Lawrence's logic.


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