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.
Facts
Place of OriginFrance, as vers libre in the late 19th century; introduced into English by T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint at the London-based Poets' Club in 1909, becoming central to the Imagist movement. 1 StructureAn open form with no prescribed meter or rhyme, following the rhythm of natural or irregular speech rather than a fixed pattern. 1 Notable ExampleWalt Whitman's poetry; Whitman is credited as the American father of free verse. 1 Connections
Associated With
Form Of Genre
Source The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Sources
1. Free Verse (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)lead section
Free verse is an open form of poetry which does not use a prescribed or regular meter or rhyme and tends to follow the rhythm of natural or irregular speech.
Definition section
Free verse does not have "predetermined patterns that define many other poetic forms," but it is not considered to be completely free.
History section
free verse is generally considered an early 20th century innovation of the late 19th-century French vers libre.
History section, Whitman
The title of "American father of free verse" has been bestowed upon Walt Whitman.
View the Source The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Princeton University Presss.v. Free Verse
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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