This article takes up the ongoing debate relating to prosody in Kiswahili poetry, with defenders of the conventional method of composition maintaining that free verse is a hybrid and a fad that has no possibility of withstanding the test of time, while proponents of free verse claim that the conventional method makes the verse closed and rigid. Alamin Mazrui has argued (1992) that since the late 1960s two broad camps have emerged in this contestation: the ‘conservationist’ school that champions a continuation of metrical poetry and the ‘liberalist’ school that aspires towards a break from metrical poetry and an adoption of free verse. The present author addresses the question of whether the ‘conservationist’ and ‘liberalist’ positions can coexist in Swahili poetry and whether they can operate fruitfully side-by-side within a single poem. An examination of an example of a Kiswahili ‘vers libre’ shows that the two trends that have emerged in Kiswahili ‘vers libre’ both adhere to some form of prosody. Poets of ‘vers libre’ do not absolutely avoid metricity. ‘Vers libre’ defocusses meter as an organizing principle for poetry and locates organizing principles in other domains of language. Poetic prosody is only a concentration of attention on certain elements of the prosodic organization in language. Bibliogr., notes.
