Key takeaways from the article:

• Individualism is a force in society now that has slowly emerged over centuries.
• It is one of the dominant forces in society now and it has an effect on every aspect of our lves.
• It has shaped the way individuals look at and view poetry but only in OUR times.

Introduction

What is individualism? Prior to studying individualisms officially in school I never thought about the subject but it was a subject that interested me. In simple terms, individualism is a social theory favouring the individual over the collective.

The first time that I came across individualism was when Mary Oliver discussed it towards the end of her book called ‘Hand of Poetry’. Most of the book was technical and explained how to write a poem but the end of the book discussed where the ‘individual voice’ of the poet came from. She writes:

“The name itself—free verse—implies that this kind of poetry rose out of a
desire for release from the restraints of meter, the measured line, and strict
rhyming patterns.”

Here is the beginning, the part that first got my attention. This is on page 82 of the pdf and upon readig it I first thought, is it true that poets who initially started writing had a desire for freedom?

Continuing she says:

“Metrical verse has been written for centuries, and, before that, poetry
depended on strict application of alliteration or some pattern of light and
heavy stresses. Poets began to write free verse near the beginning of this
century. Free verse is still in its de-velopmental stages, then. The rules are
not yet set in stone, or even in clay. Discussing free verse is like talking
about an iceberg, a shining object that is mostly underwater.

“Perhaps free verse was a product of the times. Perhaps it resulted from a
desire on the part of writers at the beginning of this century to alter the tone
of the poem.

Perhaps it had something to do with the increasing idea of a democratic and
therefore classless society in America. Perhaps the proliferation of privately
owned books had something to do with a changed attitude toward literature
in general, and the poem in particular. As small towns and farming
settlements grew into the west, with their distance from and independence
from tradition, the idea of author-as-lecturer, as a member of an educated,
special class, was scarcely applicable.

Now the poet was being called down from the lectern and in-vited, as it were, into the privacy of each reader’s home. The poet was expected to be more friendly— less “teacherly.” Content began to change. The slight glaze o gentility, and the ever-present
question of the suitability of the subject matter faded into the back-ground.

The emerging voice, it seemed, was determined to write about anything
and everything. With such expectations—of intimacy, of
“common” experience—the old metrical line, formal and composed, must
have seemed off-putting. A new tone, reflecting this growing relationship between writer and reader, was called for.

In order for the tone of the poem to change, the line had to change. Now a
line was needed that would sound and feel not like formal speech but like conversation. What was needed was a line which, when read, would feel as spontaneous, as true to
the moment, as talk in the street, or talk between friends in one’s own house.

This line naturally would have to affiliate itself more with the iambs and
dactyls of natural speech patterns — the forward-reaching feeling of speech—than with the measures of meter. That, I think, is the long and the short of it. Speech entered the poem. The poem was no longer a lecture, it was time spent with a friend. Its music was the music of conversation.”

Here, Oliver wonderfully explains her theories as to why free verse developed as a style in the US. When I first started writing poems here as an international student in the Netherlands, without realising, I was using free verse.

I saw a old man from the US complaining about free verse and he clearly displayed a conservative bent and blamed the young generation for writing in free verse implying they did it as a result of laziness or rebellious attitudes.

At the time it deeply worried me for two reasons. First, I questioned whether or not I was writing poems to the best of my potential but I was also troubled with the emotional misrepresenation that I clearly saw happening. I was using free verse initially because I wanted my voice to be heard and it was for no other reason than that.

But a a more important question now arises, namely, why did I instinctively use free verse when I first started writing poetry? The answer? It felt like that was how poetry was written. It felt natural and it felt like its what everyone around me would understand quickly. I knew in my bones that as much as I admired shakespeare, everyone around me doesn’t want to spend time breaking down the complexity of his poetic skills but they want a quick poem that evokes much imagery and is simple to grasp.

It is true, in the democratic age we live in where people are skeptical of any form of authority, people don’t like to have rules placed upon them and then have their art work judged by those rules. Whether this is correct or not is up to debate. I use plenty of poetry techniques in my poems and I enjoy doing so but I do it from my own free will. Like Mary Oliver mentions when describing free verse:

“It need not scan, but it may scan a little if the poet is so inclined. It need not rhyme in a definite pattern, but it may rhyme a little, if the poet decides to rhyme a little. It need not follow particular stanza formations, though of course it may have stanzas. It need not follow any of the old rules, necessarily. Neither does it have to avoid all of them, necessarily.“

This is the most exciting type of poem in my opinion where you just don’t know what the poet will deliver next. It leaves you on the edge of your seat. I also believe that Shakespeare, with all of the new words he invented and the break ups of meter in his work was displaying a significant amount of autonomy in his work. I believe if he were alive today to see the new young creative free verse poets, I believe he would have found it interesting.

Conclusion

I believe that individualism has unfolded over the past few centuries and is no in complete swing in the 21st centuty but we often look at how this effects governments, political decisions, economy, business and the relationships between people. I think its much more interesting to view how it changes poetry.