ABSTRACT
One might argue that the peculiar challenge of free verse lies in its being, at one and the same time, possibly the strictest and possibly the most accommodating of mediums. It can be seen as strict in that, historically, one of its principal raisons d'être is its inimitability: the 'chant profond' of the poet is registered in lexical and lineal configurations which declare no structural ancestry and wish no progeny. Free verse offers the continual renewal of unpredictable development and unprejudicial exploration of response. At the same time, it releases certain rough sketches of pattern, measure, progression, which do not sacrifice the verse's mobility, but give us a sense of design, of something one can retain and draw sustenance from. Free-verse disposition has much to do with the activation of variables, both linguistic and paralinguistic (pausing, tempo, stress position, degree of stress, tone, intonation), within the reader's mind.
