Editing Poetry analysis (section)

==== Open forms ====
In contrast, a poet using '''[[free verse]]''' (sometimes called "[[Open Form|open form]]")<ref>{{Cite web |title=Open Form |url=https://poemanalysis.com/poetic-form/open-form/ |access-date=2024-03-26 |website=Poem Analysis |language=en-US}}</ref> seeks to find fresh and uniquely appropriate forms for each poem, letting the structure grow out of the poem's subject matter or inspiration. A common perception is that open form is easier and less rigorous than closed form ([[Robert Frost|Frost]] likened it to "playing tennis with the net down",<ref>Address at Milton Academy, Massachusetts (17 May 1935){{Full citation needed|date=April 2016}}<!--I must have missed that event--is it published somewhere?--></ref> but such is not necessarily the case (skeptics should ''try'' playing tennis without a net): success with the open form requires great sensitivity to language and a particular type of adaptable understanding. In the best open form poems, the poet achieves something that is inaccessible through closed form. As X. J. Kennedy has said, "Should the poet succeed, then the discovered arrangement will seem exactly right for what the poem is saying" (582). The metre of ‘classical’ poetry is replaced in open verse by [[Cadence (poetry)|cadence]] in rhythm, line indentation, with pauses implied by the syntax, thus the limiting factor of one human breath was naturally incorporated in the poetry, essential to an oral art form, composed to be read aloud.<ref>Sounds Aloud http://soundsaloud.blogspot.co.uk</ref>

[[Walt Whitman]] was an important innovator of open form, and he demonstrates its merits in "[[A Noiseless Patient Spider]]."

:A noiseless patient spider,
:I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
:Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
:It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
:Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

:And you O my soul where you stand,
:Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
:Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
:Till the bridge you will need to be formed, till the ductile anchor hold,
:Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

The long, rolling lines—unified, held together like strong cords, by [[alliteration]] and [[assonance]]—partake of the same nature as the spider's filaments and the soul's threads. Two balanced stanzas, one describing a spider, the other the speaker's soul, perfectly frame the implicit comparison, with neither being privileged over the other. Just as the spider and the soul quest outward for significance, the two stanzas throw links to each other with subtly paired words: isolated/detached, launched/fling, tirelessly/ceaselessly, surrounding/surrounded.

In this poem, Whitman uses synonyms and antonyms to give structural integrity to a poem comprising two yoked stanzas, much like (but not exactly like) the way poets working within closed forms use meter and rhyme to give structural integrity to their poems. The poem has form, but the form was not imposed by previous conventions. It has open form.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YoAdAQAAIAAJ&q=A+Noiseless+Patient+Spider%22.+open+form|title=Literature and the Writing Process|last1=McMahan|first1=Elizabeth|last2=Day|first2=Susan|last3=Funk|first3=Robert|date=December 2006|publisher=Pearson/Prentice Hall|isbn=9780132248020}}</ref>