Free verse

Free verse is an open form of poetry which does not use a prescribed or regular meter or rhyme[1] and tends to follow the rhythm of natural or irregular speech.

Sandburg responded saying, in part, "There have been poets who could and did play more than one game of tennis with unseen rackets, volleying airy and fantastic balls over an insubstantial net, on a frail moonlight fabric of a court.

According to Jan Morris, "When Welsh poets speak of Free Verse, they mean forms like the sonnet or the ode, which obey the same rules as English poesy.

Strict Metres verse still honours the immensely complex rules laid down for correct poetic composition 600 years ago.

It was largely through the activities of La Vogue, a weekly journal founded by Gustave Kahn,[23] as well as the appearance of a band of poets unequaled at any one time in the history of French poetry.

[23] Remy de Gourmont's Livre des Masques gave definition to the whole vers libre movement;[32] he notes that there should arise, at regular intervals, a full and complete line, which reassures the ear and guides the rhythm.

[39] Although free verse requires no meter, rhyme, or other traditional poetic techniques, a poet can still use them to create some sense of structure.

"[44] The sort of cadencing that we now recognize in free verse can be traced back at least as far as the Biblical Hebrew psalmist poetry of the Bible.

Walt Whitman, who based his long lines in his poetry collection Leaves of Grass on the phrasing of the King James Bible, influenced later American free verse composers, notably Allen Ginsberg.

[45] One form of free verse was employed by Christopher Smart in his long poem Jubilate Agno (Latin: Rejoice in the Lamb), written some time between 1759 and 1763 but not published until 1939.

Christina Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, and T. E. Brown all wrote examples of rhymed but unmetered verse, poems such as W. E. Henley's "Discharged" (from his In Hospital sequence).

Later in the preface to Some Imagist Poets 1916, he comments, "Only the name is new, you will find something much like vers libre in Dryden's Threnodia Augustalis; a great deal of Milton's Samson Agonistes, and the oldest in Chaucer's House of Fame.

[47] Goethe in some early poems, such as "Prometheus" and also Hölderlin used free verse occasionally, due in part to a misinterpretation of the meter used in Pindar's poetry.