Free Verse By Robert Graves Analysis

I chose the poem “Free Verse” by Robert Graves to display an example of free verse. Robert Graves was born in 1895 and died at the age of 90 in 1985. Graves was born in Wimbledon, near London. He was raised in an upper middle-class, patriotic, educated and strict household. Graves enlisted into the military at the onset of World War 1 and fought on the front lines, where he was severely injured. He developed an early reputation as a war poet using his front line experiences to develop realistic war poetry. He also suffered from shell-shock due to his time spent on the front lines. Over the course of his life, he produced over 140 different works. He was known as a poet, novelist, critic and classicist. He was also a prominent translator of …show more content…
Regarding the content, Graves is expressing his happiness that he is finally liberated from the structures and rules of traditional poetry. Graves says, “I now delight in spite of the might and the right of classic tradition, in writing and reciting straight ahead, without let or omission just any little rhyme in any little time that runs in my head”. In the following lines, Graves uses simile comparing the rhymes of traditional poetry to “Prussian soldiers on parade that march, stiff as starch, foot to foot, boot to boot, blade to blade, button to button”. Graves is showing the reader that traditional poetry is often uniform, unexciting, and strict. Instead of this unnatural stiff march, his poems need a natural and lifelike “run, ripple, and shake. He goes on to say, “My rhymes must go Turn 'ee, twist 'ee; Twinkling, frosty, Will-o- the- wisp- like, misty”. This is an example of Graves writing just any little rhyme that runs in his head without omission. Graves describes his pleasure in taking a rhyme and how pretty it is to “poke it, and choke it, change it, arrange it, Straight-lace it, deface it”. Graves is once again using just any word that comes to mind to mold his poem, as he is free from the restrictions of traditional poetry. Additionally, Graves describes “chopping and chewing, and hacking and hewing these rhymes to weld it into a uniform stanza”. Graves is manipulating rhymes at his own discretion to make a uniform stanza. These 4 verbs chop, chew, hack, and hew are all very similar to each other showing that there is more than one way to say something and we should explore these different