[1] From Middle French cadence, and from Italian cadenza, and from Latin cadentia, with the meaning "to fall.""
In poetry cadence describes the rhythmic pacing of language to a resolution[2] and was a new idea in 1915[3] used to describe the subtle rise and fall in the natural flow and pause of ordinary speech[4] where the strong and weak beats of speech fall into a natural order[5] restoring the audible quality to poetry as a spoken art.
[6] Cadence verse is non-syllabic resembling music rather than older metrical poetry with a rhythmic curve containing one or more stressed accents and roughly corresponding to the necessity of breathing,[7] the cadence being more rapid and marked than in prose.
[8] The idea that cadence should be substituted for metre was at the heart of the Imagist credo according to T. E.
[9] Unrhymed cadence in Vers libre is built upon 'organic rhythm,' or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system.