What Is Free Verse? Poetry Without Metre and What Holds It Together

Traditional English verse is built from feet, units of stressed and unstressed syllables repeated in a pattern, so that a line of iambic pentameter goes da-DUM five times and a reader's ear expects the sixth; rhyme marks the line ends and binds lines into stanzas; and the fixed forms, sonnet, ballad, villanelle, set the number and arrangement of lines in advance. Free verse keeps none of these as rules. Its lines are of any length, its stresses fall where the sense puts them, and it may rhyme or not as the poet chooses. The French called it vers libre in the 1880s, and the name is a little misleading, since the poet is not free of decisions but has to make all of them without a template.

The Bible in the King James translation, whose Psalms and prophets fall into long unrhymed cadences, is the oldest model in English, and Walt Whitman took it in 1855 for Leaves of Grass, the first major body of free verse in the language, with lines that run to the width of the page and swell on repetition and catalogue. The French Symbolists loosened the alexandrine in the 1880s, and the Imagists in London around 1912, Ezra Pound, H.D. and the others, made a programme of it: no word that does not contribute, the thing presented directly, and rhythm composed in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than the metronome. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in 1922 and William Carlos Williams's short, plain-spoken poems settled the form as the modern one, and by mid-century a young poet who wrote sonnets was making a statement.

A free-verse poem that works is organised, and the organisation is by other means:

• •The line break: the one formal device free verse keeps, which sets the pace, isolates a word at the end or start of a line, and creates a small suspension before the next line resolves it; where the line ends is the poem's most important decision
• •Cadence: rhythms of speech and breath, often falling into loose patterns that the ear catches without a metre being kept
• •Repetition and parallelism: Whitman's and the Bible's method, phrases of the same shape building on each other
• •Sound: internal rhyme, assonance and alliteration used where they serve, without the obligation of a scheme
• •Image and syntax: the sentence's own shape, and the movement from one picture to the next, carrying what metre used to carry
• •The white space of the page, which since Mallarme and Williams has been part of the score

Robert Frost said that writing free verse was like playing tennis with the net down, and the objection has never gone away: without a metre, what stops a poem from being prose chopped into lines? The honest answer is that nothing does except the poet's judgement, and that a great deal of free verse is exactly that. The defence is that the net was never the game. Eliot wrote that no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job, that the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras even in the freest verse, and his own lines are full of half-remembered pentameters; the best free verse is written by poets who could write metre and chose, line by line, when to let it in. The form asks the reader to attend to what the poem is doing instead of to whether it is keeping the rules, which is a harder kind of attention and the reason bad free verse is more tiresome than bad sonnets.

Free verse is now the default, in English and in most languages, and the formal poets are the dissenters; the New Formalism of the 1980s argued for a return to metre and produced good poems without changing the balance. The forms have not died, and a poet may write a sonnet in one book and free verse in the next, but the assumption that a poem has a beat is gone from the general reader, which is one reason poetry's audience has shrunk and one reason rap, which keeps the beat, has taken part of the audience that poetry lost. Free verse remains what the Imagists made it, the attempt to let each poem find the shape its subject needs, and it is judged by whether it did.

William Carlos Williams's The Red Wheelbarrow, published in 1923, is sixteen words long and shows what a line break can do. It begins so much depends, then breaks, then gives upon on a line by itself, so that you hang on the word before you learn what depends on what. Later it splits wheelbarrow into wheel at the end of one line and barrow at the start of the next, and the same happens to rainwater. Read as a single sentence, the poem is a plain observation. Broken into lines, it makes you look at each part of an ordinary object as if you had never seen one.

This is also the clearest way to see the difference between free verse and the prose poem, a related form that the French poet Baudelaire helped establish. A prose poem gives up the line altogether and is printed as ordinary paragraphs, relying on image, compression and rhythm within the sentence. Free verse keeps the line as its main tool. A useful test when reading is to imagine the poem printed as prose and ask what you lose. In a strong free-verse poem you lose timing, emphasis and surprise; in a weak one you lose almost nothing, which is usually the sign that the breaks were arbitrary.

Between strict metre and free verse lie forms that keep a count without keeping a beat. Syllabic verse counts only syllables and ignores where the stresses fall. Marianne Moore built many of her poems from stanzas whose lines differ in length but repeat exactly the same syllable counts in the same positions from one stanza to the next, a pattern the eye can see on the page that the ear barely notices. Dylan Thomas used syllable counts for Fern Hill, and the English haiku, with its lines of five, seven and five syllables, is the form of syllabic verse most readers meet first.

Accentual verse does the reverse, counting stresses and ignoring the unstressed syllables around them. It is the oldest metre in English: the lines of Beowulf have four strong beats, split into two halves and bound by alliteration, with any number of light syllables in between. In the nineteenth century Gerard Manley Hopkins revived the principle as what he called sprung rhythm, in which a line has a set number of stresses that may fall side by side, giving his poems their crowded, urgent sound. Both forms show that the choice was never simply between rules and freedom, and many free-verse poets have borrowed from them.

Free verse drops regular metre but keeps the line. The prose poem goes further and drops line breaks entirely, setting a poem in sentences and paragraphs like prose while keeping poetry's compression, imagery and attention to sound. Charles Baudelaire's collection Paris Spleen, published in 1869, made the form famous, and French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud followed.

Prose poems raise the question of what makes something a poem at all, since they have neither metre nor lines. The usual answer is intensity: a prose poem tends to be short, concentrated and image-driven, and it asks to be read slowly, the way a poem is. Comparing a free verse poem with a prose poem shows how much work the line break does when it is present.

Free verse is poetry without a fixed metre or rhyme scheme, descended from the cadences of the English Bible through Whitman and the French Symbolists to the Imagists and Eliot, who made it the dominant form after 1915. It is held together by the line break, by cadence, repetition, sound and image, and by the page itself, and the standard objection, that it is prose cut into lines, is true of its failures and answered by its successes, which are written by poets who know what they have set aside.