Free verse refers to poetry that does not follow regular meter, rhythm or rhyme.
Free verse refers to poetry that does not follow regular meter, rhythm or rhyme. Devoid of recurring line lengths, metrical patterns, and rhyme, free verse can seem random, having no obvious pattern or organization at all. Yet since its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century , free verse has enabled a different kind of organization, as poets use the elements of poetry, repeated imagery and/or syntactic patterns to create coherence and connection among lines. Even as it eschews regular meter and rhyme schemes, free verse can draw on metrical patterns and occasional rhyme to tie lines together.
What distinguishes free verse from other traditional forms of verse is that it uses these elements only occasionally—for a few lines here and there in a longer poem—and does not use them to structure the poem as a whole. A poem in free verse does not lack structure; it simply does not maintain or use regular meter or rhyme to structure the poem as a whole. Instead, free verse relies more on thematic, syntactic, or semantic repetition and development to create coherence.
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is often credited as introducing free verse into English-language poetry. While not quite true (other experiments and uses preceded his–much like the Blackberry preceded Steve Jobs’ iPhone), Whitman’s poetry helped to establish free verse’s potential for exploring a broad range of topics and embracing new to organize verse lines. Later-nineteenth-century poets, such as Matthew Arnold in England, further explored the use of free verse, but it was the French symbolists (Jules Laforgue, Gustave Kahn, and Arthur Rimbaud) who practiced what they called vers libre during this period.
In the twentieth century, free verse came to dominate poetic production in English, beginning with the modernists (e.g., T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams) who saw the open form as allowing for the more nimble representation of a modern fragmented and accelerated world.
Here’s a particularly famous example of free verse by William Carlos Williams:
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.3
In what sense is this verse free? It doesn’t rhyme. It doesn’t have a set meter. But it does have a consistent line and stanza: each stanza consists of one three-word line followed by one one-word line. Williams has even broken up the single word “wheelbarrow” into two words to fit his form. It is as rigorous as haiku in its way. It just doesn’t follow rules previously put down by a poetic tradition. Because the history of poem does not consider word count (as distinct from syllable count) an element of closed form, the poem is considered to be free verse.
Free verse is generally easy to recognize. What is harder to recognize is the principle of order that free verse poems employ. There usually is one: it may be the number of words or syllables in a line, it may be the grammatical clause; it may be the line breaks o