Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each poet by whether they LOOSEN the metrical count or EXPAND the metrical repertoire.
Groups: Loosens or abandons the count · Expands the repertoire
- Darío: revives abandoned classical metres
- Rimbaud: displaces the caesura, then writes prose poems
- Darío: imports French symbolist music into Spanish
- Whitman: no fixed syllable or stress count
Hints
- Two poets remove constraints; one adds options.
- Reviving old metres and importing new ones is expansion, not abandonment.
Show the answer
Loosens or abandons the count: Whitman: no fixed syllable or stress count, Rimbaud: displaces the caesura, then writes prose poems
Expands the repertoire: Darío: revives abandoned classical metres, Darío: imports French symbolist music into Spanish
Why
Both routes reach comparable freedom from opposite directions. Whitman removes the count; Darío multiplies the counts available until no single one is normative. The second strategy is easier to miss because on the page it still looks like traditional metre.
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
- Whitman’s lines have no fixed syllable or stress count. What organises them instead?
- At roughly what age did Rimbaud stop writing altogether?
- Free verse is verse written without any organising principle.
- Keats compresses dense sensory detail into strict pentameter, whilst Whitman structures his poems through…
- Arrange these publications in chronological order.
- Which are true of iambic pentameter?
- Darío’s modernismo was the first literary movement to travel from Latin America to Spain rather than in the…