Origins of Free Verse

ELT 41: 1 1998 supposed to be humorous. Perhaps the book's title could be more precise. In any case, literary critics who study humor as a primary subject will find only a modicum to interest them here. Lawrence and Comedy will be vexing for many Lawrence scholars and stimulating for many others. There are insights into both the man and his work contained in the volume. That the reader will be convinced that Lawrence and comedy are inextricably intertwined is unlikely. Steven H. Gale _______________ Kentucky State University Origins of Free Verse H. T. Kirby-Smith. The Origins of Free Verse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. xv + 304 pp. $49.50 IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, says H. T. Kirby-Smith, "no literary topic has proved more divisive than free verse. Division begins on the issue of whether free verse exists, and among those who admit its existence the question is whether it is a good idea." The persuasiveness of the rather startling general claim must depend, I suppose, on what you understand by "literary" and "topic" and, perhaps, by "divisive ." As to the question of which lobby Kirby-Smith himself marches through in this "division," it does not come as a shock to discover him answering in the affirmative on both issues: free verse does exist; and certainly it is a good thing—providing it's really free verse, which means, of course, that it's not really free. "The only area of agreement," he continues, "shared by many whose literary politics differ sharply in other respects, is that no one knows what free verse is. For my purposes that limited consensus is worse than none at all, since the aim of this study is to identify various kinds of free verse and to explain how they originated." This aim is achieved in this rich and thoughtful book, but in achieving it Kirby-Smith actually delivers rather more than this modest enough agenda of historical description might lead us to expect. As well as the history of a prosodie practice, the book proposes something like a theory of poetry (more is promised in a companion volume, Beyond Free Verse); and it relates sometimes tiny and no doubt often unconscious decisions about the shape and weight and order of words in a poetic line to very much larger issues of the intellectual and cultural history of which each written line becomes a part. 118 BOOK REVIEWS Kirby-Smith's finely tuned ear seems attached to a brain that never forgets that rhythm is a way of making meaning. His readings of individual poems are always interesting, and The Origins of Free Verse affords the incidental pleasure of watching a good critical mind at work. This book cannot have been written in a hurry. It certainly gives the impression of drawing on a long experience of reading and teaching poetry. "Can Free Verse Be Classified?" asks the title of chapter three. We all know the answer: there are exactly as many categories of free verse, or anything else, as you want there to be. Kirby-Smith adduces the story of a little girl who organized a dog show in which there were three categories for entrants—big dogs, little dogs, and brown dogs—before advancing his own provisional taxonomy for classifying free verse: I realize that there may be some who will be disappointed that I have not more carefully distinguished, say, Airedales from Pekingese, and who will detect a preference for mongrels. Having recently read a book review, itself not at all recent, in which the writer went about his business like an efficient enthusiast at an animal shelter, exterminating some fifty books of poetry and putting up one or two for adoption, I have a horror of such exact categories. Conversational moments like this reveal that this book is not only about rhythm but that it has a distinctive rhythm of its own, one that provides a discursive balance for passages when a different kind of attention is asked of the reader. The man with "a horror of. . . exact categories" is perfectly capable of inviting us into an enthusiastic discussion of whether the opening of "Out of...