Forms
Free Verse
Also Known As Vers Libre The French term for the form; English free verse is generally described as an early-20th-century development of the late-19th-century French vers libre.
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Poetry that abandons a fixed meter and regular rhyme scheme, relying instead on rhythms of ordinary speech, the visual arrangement of the line, and patterns of repetition and image to create its effects. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is the form's most influential English language starting point, and the form became the dominant mode of poetry written in English over the twentieth century. Where free verse ends and prose poetry begins is a genuinely unsettled question among scholars of poetic form, addressed in this entry's dissent record rather than settled here.
T. S. Eliot's 1917 essay Reflections on Vers Libre challenges the premise that free verse is simply formless; see the recorded dissent on this fact.
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Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Description
The prevailing account, and this entry's own description, treats free verse as poetry that abandons fixed meter and rhyme in favor of the rhythms of ordinary speech. In "Reflections on Vers Libre" (New Statesman, 1917), T. S. Eliot challenges the premise that this amounts to formlessness: he argues no verse is genuinely free for a poet doing serious work, that a "ghost of some simple metre" haunts even the loosest free verse and gives it its felt shape, and that the real distinction poets and critics reach for is not verse with rules against verse without them, but a good poem against a bad one, regardless of which convention it declines. This bears directly on the entry's own unsettled question of where free verse ends and prose poetry begins: if no verse is ever truly free of an underlying constraint, the boundary Eliot denies is formlessness at all is not a line between free verse and prose but a continuum of how audibly the constraint operates, a different account of the form's edge, not a rejection that free verse exists as a mode.
A dissenting reading, from T. S. EliotThe Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton University Press
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