Free verse

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Free verse

Free Verse poetry does not have a strict pattern of rhyming. It does not have regular meter, rhyme, fixed line length, or a specific stanza pattern.

arly usage of the term appears in 1915 in the anonymous preface to the first Imagist anthology. The main author of this preface was Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington, born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an England writer and poetry.Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel Death of a Hero, and the controversy arising from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry....
. The preface states: "We do not insist upon 'free-verse' as the only method of writing poetry.

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Free Verse poetry does not have a strict pattern of rhyming. It does not have regular meter, rhyme, fixed line length, or a specific stanza pattern.

History

An early usage of the term appears in 1915 in the anonymous preface to the first Imagist anthology. The main author of this preface was Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an United States expatriate poetry, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist poetry movement in the first half of the 20th century....
, who wrote: "As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome

Metronome

A metronome is any device that produces a regulated aural, visual or tactile pulse to establish a steady tempo in the performance of music. It is a useful practice tool for musicians that dates back to the early 19th century....
." D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an England author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary criticism. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization....
wrote that Whitman "pruned away his clichés — perhaps his clichés of rhythm as well as of phrase" and that all one could do with free verse was "get rid of the stereotyped movements and the old hackneyed associations of sound and sense".

Some poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, must still display some elements of form. Pound's friend T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

'Thomas Stearns Eliot', Order of Merit , was a poet, dramatist, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are the poems The Love Song of J....
wrote: "No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job." Donald Hall

Donald Hall

Donald Hall is an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2004....
goes as far as to say that "the form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau

Rondeau (poetry)

This article is about the poetry form. For other uses, see Rondeau.A rondeau is a form of French poetry with 15 lines written on two rhymes, as well as a corresponding musical form developed to set this characteristic verse structure....
."

Some poets have considered free verse restrictive in its own way. In 1922 Robert Bridges

Robert Bridges

Robert Seymour Bridges, Order of Merit , was an English poet, and poet laureate from 1913 to 1930....
voiced his reservations in the essay 'Humdrum and Harum-Scarum

Humdrum and Harum-Scarum

'Humdrum and Harum-Scarum: A Lecture on Free Verse' is an essay by the poet Robert Bridges, first published in November 1922 in poetry in both the North American Review and the London Mercury. In it Bridges explains what he regards as the 'adverse conditions' that free verse imposes upon a poet:...
.' Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech....
later remarked that writing free verse was like "playing tennis without a net".

Precursors

As the name vers libre suggests, this technique of using more irregular cadences is often said to derive from the practices of 19th century French poets such as Gustave Kahn

Gustave Kahn

Gustave Kahn was a French language Symbolism poet and art critic.Kahn was born in Metz.He claimed to have invented the term vers libre, or free verse; he was in any case one of the first European exponents of the form....
and Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue was an innovative France poet, often referred to as a Symbolism poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist"....
in his Derniers vers of 1890. However, in English the sort of cadencing that we now recognize as a variety of free verse can be traced back at least as far as the King James Bible. Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walter Whitman was an United States Poetry of the United States, essayist, journalism, and humanism. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and literary realism, incorporating both views in his works....
, approach on the Bible, was the major precursor for modern poets writing free verse, though they were reluctant to acknowledge his influence.

Many poets of the Victorian era experimented with form. Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti

Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet, who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is best known for her long poem Goblin Market, her love poem "Remember", and for her Christmas poem "In the Bleak Midwinter"....
, Coventry Patmore

Coventry Patmore

Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore was an England poet and critic.The eldest son of author Peter George Patmore, Coventry was born at Woodford in Essex, England....
, and T. E. Brown all wrote examples of unpatterned rhymed verse. Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was an England poet, and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold , literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator....
's poem Philomela contains some rhyme but is very free. Poems such as W. E. Henley's 'Discharged' (from his In Hospital sequence), and Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson , was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and Travel writing. Stevenson was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, J....
's poems 'The Light-Keeper' and 'The Cruel Mistress' could be counted early examples of free verse.

In France, a few pieces in Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French people poet, born in Charleville-M?zi?res. As part of the decadent movement, his influence on modern literature, music and art has been enduring and pervasive....
's prose poem collection Illuminations

Illuminations (poems)

Illuminations is the title presumably given by Paul Verlaine to a collection of unpublished poems written in manuscript by Arthur Rimbaud. The first known use of the title Les Illuminations is in a letter Verlaine wrote to his brother-in-law Charles de Sivry in 1878....
were arranged in manuscript in lines, rather than prose.

In the Netherlands, tachtiger (i.e. member of 1880s generation of innovative poets) Frederik van Eeden

Frederik van Eeden

Frederik Willem van Eeden was a late 19th century and early 20th century Netherlands writer and psychiatrist. He was a leading member of the Tachtigers, and had top billing among the editors of De Nieuwe Gids during its celebrated first few years of publication, starting in 1885....
employed the form at least once (in his poem Waterlelie ["water lily"]).

Goethe (particularly in some early poems, such as Prometheus

Prometheus (Goethe)

Prometheus is a poem by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, in which the character of the mythic Prometheus addresses God in misotheist accusation and defiance....
) and Hölderlin used it occasionally, due in part to a misinterpretation of the meter used in Pindar

Pindar

Pindar , was an Ancient Greek Lyric poetry poet.Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, Pindar is the one whose work is by far the best preserved, and critics in antiquity tended to regard him as the greatest....
's poetry; in Hölderlin's case, he also continued to write unmetered poems after discovering this error.