French alexandrine

According to verse historian Mikhail Gasparov, the French alexandrine developed from the Ambrosian octosyllable,

 × –  u  – ×   –  u ×
Aeterne rerum conditor

by gradually losing the final two syllables,

 × –  u  – ×   –
Aeterne rerum cond (construct)

then doubling this line in a syllabic context with phrasal stress rather than length as a marker.[1]

Alexander the Great in a diving bell: a scene from the line's namesake, the Roman d'Alexandre.

The earliest recorded use of alexandrines is in the Medieval French poem Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne of 1150, but the name derives from their more famous use in part of the Roman d'Alexandre of 1170.[2] L. E. Kastner states:

From about the year 1200 the Alexandrine began to supplant the decasyllabic line as the metre of the chansons de geste, and at the end of the thirteenth century it had gained so completely the upper hand as the epic line that several of the old chansons in the decasyllabic line were turned into Alexandrines...[3]

These early alexandrines were slightly looser rhythmically than those reintroduced in the 16th century. Significantly, they allowed an "epic caesura" — an extrametrical mute e at the close of the first hemistich (half-line), as exemplified in this line from the medieval Li quatre fils Aymon:

o   o    o   o  o   S(e)   o  o   o o     o S
Or sunt li quatre frère | sus el palais plenier[4]

o=any syllable; S=stressed syllable; (e)=optional mute e; |=caesura

However, toward the end of the 14th century, the line was "totally abandoned, being ousted by its old rival the decasyllabic";[5] and despite occasional isolated attempts, would not regain its stature for almost 200 years.[6]

Although used in exceptional cases by some 17th-century French poets,[16] Victor Hugo popularized the alexandrin ternaire (also referred to as trimètre) as an alternative rhythm to the classical alexandrine. His famous self-descriptive line:

exemplifies the structure of the alexandrin ternaire, which preserves the medial caesura with a word break, but de-emphasizes it by surrounding it with two stronger phrase breaks after syllables four and eight:

o o o S | o o ¦ o S | o o o S (e)

|=strong caesura; ¦=word break

Although generally embraced by the French Romantics and Symbolists, the alexandrin ternaire remained a supplemental line, used within a classical alexandrine context and forming no more than one quarter of the alexandrine lines written during this time.[18] Passages of classical alexandrines were still written by these poets, as for example this rimes croisées quatrain by Charles Baudelaire:

These three similar terms (in French vers libres and vers libre are homophones[20]) designate distinct historical strategies to introduce more prosodic variety into French verse. All three involve verse forms beyond just the alexandrine, but just as the alexandrine was chief among lines, it is the chief target of these modifications.

Vers libres

Vers libres (also vers libres classiques, vers mêlés, or vers irréguliers[21]) are found in a variety of minor and hybrid genres of the 17th and 18th century.[21] The works are composed of lines of various lengths, without regularity in distribution or order; however, each individual line is perfectly metrical, and the rule of alternation of rhymes is followed.[21] The result is somewhat analogous to the Pindarics of Abraham Cowley.[20] Two of the most famous works written in vers libres are Jean de La Fontaine's Fables and Molière's Amphitryon.

Vers libéré

Vers libéré was a mid-to-late-19th-century extension of the liberties begun to be taken by the Romantics with their embrace of the alexandrin ternaire. The liberties taken included the weakening, movement, and erasure of caesurae, and rejection of the rule of alternation of rhymes.[22] Although writers of vers libéré consistently continued to use rhyme, many of them accepted categories of rhyme which were previously considered "careless" or unusual.[23] The alexandrine was not their only metrical target; they also cultivated the use of vers impair — lines with an odd, rather than even, number of syllables.[23] These uneven lines, though known from earlier French verse, were relatively uncommon and helped suggest a new rhythmic register.

Vers libre

Vers libre is the source of the English term free verse, and is effectively identical in meaning. It can be seen as a radical extension of the tendencies of both vers libres (various and unpredictable line lengths) and vers libéré (weakening of strictures for caesura and rhymes, as well as experimentation with unusual line lengths). Its birth — for the reading public at least — can be dated exactly: 1886; in this year, editor Gustave Kahn published several seminal vers libre poems in his review La Vogue, including poems by Arthur Rimbaud (written over a decade previously) and Jules Laforgue, with more following in the next years.[24] Vers libre shed all metrical and prosodic constraints, such as verse length, rhyme, and caesura; Laforgue said, "I forget to rhyme, I forget about the number of syllables, I forget about stanzaic structure."[24]