Practice question · True or false
Free verse is verse written without any organising principle.
Hints
- Ask what would happen to a Whitman poem if the parallel structures were broken.
- The organisation has moved from sound to grammar, not disappeared.
Show the answer
False
Why
False. Whitman’s poems are organised as tightly as sonnets, by parallelism, anaphora and catalogue rather than by metre. Break the grammatical repetitions and the poem collapses exactly as a sonnet would if its rhymes were removed.
Practise Poetic Traditions III: Romanticism to Free Verse
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Literature I is free to start.
More questions on Poetic Traditions III: Romanticism to Free Verse
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