free verse

Poetry without metrical form. At the beginning of the 20th century, many poets believed that the 19th century had accomplished most of what could be done with regular metre, and rejected it, in much the same spirit as John Milton in the 17th century had rejected rhyme, preferring irregular metres that made it possible to express thought clearly and without distortion.

This was true of T S Eliot and the Imagists; it was also true of poets who, like the Russians Sergey Esenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky, placed emphasis on public performance. The shift to free verse began under the very different influences of US poet Walt Whitman and French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Whitman worked in longer, end-stopped lines, preferring more prose-like cadences to regular metres. Poets including Robert Graves and W H Auden have criticized free verse on the ground that it lacks the difficulty of true accomplishment, but their own metrics would have been considered loose by earlier critics. The freeness of free verse is largely relative, and does not suggest a lack of form, as some critics have suggested. Poets working in free verse are typically interested in first mimicking and then heightening the rhythms of common speech. Many find their free verse forms during the composition process; such verse is often referred to as ‘organic form’.