A Prosody of Free Verse : Explorations in Rhythm

A Prosody of Free Verse sets out, for the first time, a comprehensive system for accounting for the irregular rhythms that characterize unrhymed and unmetrical poetry. In this groundbreaking study, Richard Andrews provides a detailed analysis of free verse in order to theorize how the rhythmic patterns that underlie it are constituted and structured. Whereas previous attempts have focused on variations on regular metre, this volume breaks away form that tradition and draws upon the two wellsprings of free verse: music and dance. The book also suggests that whereas the ''foot'' is the basic unit of rhythm in metrical verse, the ''line'' is the better unit for analysis in free verse.

There is to date no comprehensive account of the rhythms of free verse. The main purpose of A Prosody of Free Verse: explorations in rhythm is to fill that gap and begin to provide a systematic approach to describing and analyzing free verse rhythms. Most studies have declared the attempt to write such a prosody as impossible: they prefer to see free verse as an aberrant version of regular metrical verse. They also believe that behind free verse is the ‘ghost of metre’.

Running against that current, A Prosody of Free Verse bases its new system on additive rhythms that do not fit conventional time signatures. Inspiration is taken from jazz, contemporary music and dance, not only in their systems of notation but in performance. The book argues that twentieth and twenty-first century rhythms in poetry as based on the line rather than the metrical foot as the unit of rhythm , and that larger rhythmic structures fall into verse paragraphs rather than stanzas.