Francis Vielé-Griffin
Born 1864 in Norfolk, Virginia
Edmund Wilson:
We are surprised to learn that Vielé-Griffin is still considered an important poet. But the point was that he had performed a feat which astonished and impressed the French and of which it is probable that no Frenchman was capable: he had succeeded in wrecking once for all the classical Alexandrine, hitherto the basis of French poetry––or rather, as an English reader at once recognizes, he had dispensed with it altogtehr and begun writing English metres in French. The French called this "vers libre," but it is "free" only in the sense of being irregular, like many poems of Matthew Arnold and Browning."
––Axel's Castle, pages 16-17
