Verse Forms II

This chapter provides an overview of twentieth-century developments in poetic form, with a focus on the modernist era. The chapter follows Modernism in taking an expansive view of poetic form, examining, in turn, engagement with the metrical and strophic structures that constitute poetic form in the strictest sense; the sonic and visual form of poetic texts; and modes of poetic address and poetry’s role in public discourse. These frames have been selected to demonstrate the manner in which, during the early decades of the twentieth century, poets and an emergent generation of literary theorists engaged not only in formal experimentation but also in debates about the nature of form as such. In the final section, I turn to consider the resonance of these experiments in later-twentieth-century and twenty-first-century verse.