THE LOST AND FOUND PAGE IN UKRAINIAN FREE VERSIFICATION: THE 1940–1950s POETRY

Abstract

The article gives a research of the functions of free verse works by prominent and less studied Ukrainian poets, issued in the 1940-1950s (in both continental and Diaspora dimensions), considering the dominance of metric verse forms. The free verse literary work which has a definite genre marker (meditation, landscape, dream, remembrance etc.) transfers its semantic accents from external to internal world. The stylistic factor is also important here due to the rapid shifts in individual styles of Ukrainian poets, caused by realities of social, political, and cultural life in our country in the middle of the 20th century. Thanks to sporadic but conceptual poetic achievements writing during the period studied, it would be possible to eliminate any white spots in Ukrainian free verse development, which fact has conditioned the topicality of this work and its main objective – to reveal the specific features in Ukrainian vers libres written in 1940-1950s in their scrutinizing with metric poems. Particularly, free verses by continental (Pavlo Tychyna, Andriy Malyshko, Fedir Potushnyak) and Diaspora (Mykhailo Orest, Leonid Mosendz, Yevhen Malaniuk) poets show the style transitions from early Modernism (including Neoromanticism and Symbolism) to preliminary germs of Post-Modernism, often in a single poem In 1940-1950s, the sacral (particularly mythical) elements of a free verse revealed more powerfully in using the natural and religious conceits. The metaphor ‘Temple of Nature’ with poetic creativity for the main ritual is thereinafter exposed through comprehending the meditative intonations to integrate the archetypes of Ukrainian worldview into the cultural macrocosmos of the whole world. This, in general, would make a free verse form immanent to Ukrainian poetry because of its unequal rhythms to symbolize the movements of human soul.