Heteromorphic Verse in Romanian Poetry of the First Decades of the 20th Century

Abstract

In the article the Romanian heteromorphic verse of the early 20th century is examined. It is shown that, despite rejecting traditional norms of verse organization – such as isometry, isotony, isosyllabism, rhyme, and regular strophic patterns – these works are nonetheless based on certain versification systems. The first experiments with poetic forms were recorded specifically in syllabo-tonic verse. Such experiments include heterometric or free forms of a nontraditional type, which are constructed on the principle of graphic segmentation of the verse, meaning these works consist of regular syllabo-tonic lines but with disrupted line-length uniformity. Among them, we identify structures with a metrical dominant, where the rhythmic inertia of the text is still perceptible, and constructions with an unlimited range of line lengths, where rhythmic scansion is lost. Another manifestation of disorder is found in heterometric verses – disordered structures that combine lines written in different meters without a systematic pattern, creating a unified whole that cannot be separated into distinct components. Within such structures, we distinguish works where lines written in different syllabo-tonic meters are disorderly combined, and poems where syllabo-tonic verses alternate with tonic lines and even with free verse. Tonic disorder is represented by heteroictic forms, which appear in two types: structures with a certain regularity in the number of ictuses and inter-ictic intervals, organized into strophoids, and structures with a chaotic alternation of lines with varying ictus patterns and a wide (ranging from zero to five) inter-ictic interval range. It is demonstrated that the emergence of heteromorphic structures reflects an effort to overcome the excessive rigidity of canonical verse. Its defining feature lies in the intention to challenge the fundamental principle of homomorphism in versification techniques.