Practice question · Multiple choice
Whitman’s lines have no fixed syllable or stress count. What organises them instead?
Hints
- Ask what repeats in a Whitman poem if the metre does not.
- The repetition is of grammatical structure rather than sound.
Show the answer
B. Grammatical parallelism, anaphora and catalogue
Why
Grammatical parallelism. A repeated syntactic structure organises as strongly as a repeated sound, and Whitman’s catalogues and anaphora hold the poems together with no metre at all. Free verse is not verse without rules, the rules have moved from sound to syntax.
Practise Poetic Traditions III: Romanticism to Free Verse
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