Free verse, historical poetics, and settler time

This article pushes back against the ongoing literary historical tendency to narrate the emergence of free verse forms in the modernist era as a salutary break with the poetic practices of the nineteenth century. Using the methods of historical poetics, I read key texts by the modernist poet and activist Mary Austin, who helped to invent Native American poetry as a field, to show that the concept of free verse was a tool of settler cultural domination as much as it was a democratization of poetic language or a formal innovation. Austin framed free verse poetry as a technology for managing time—specifically, for integrating Native Americans into the relentlessly linear march of what Mark Rifkin has recently theorized as settler time. Austin's theories of free verse had significant, distorting effects on the way Native American oral expressions were presented as poetry in modernist anthologies. Remembering that debates about rhythm, meter, and poetic form were also debates about temporality, space, and identity fundamentally challenges our critical assumptions about the hierarchies of form and genre that implicitly structure our literary historical narratives.