Definition and Examples of Free verse – Literary terms

Free verse definition, Free verse examples, Free Verse Literary terms 

Definition and Examples of Free verse – Literary terms

Free verse:

A type of POETRY that differs from traditional VERSE FORMS in that it is "free" of the regular beat of METER, depending instead on the individual poet's sensitivity to the music of natural speech RHYTHMS. Also, free verse usually lacks RHYME and often has irregular line lengths and fragmentary SYNTAX. The modern free-verse movement began in the nineteenth century with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and the poetry of French SYMBOLISTS Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine and of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Forerunners of free verse range from the alliterative verse of the MIDDLE AGES to the Psalms of the King James Bible to the BLANK VERSE of John Milton and a number of poems by William Blake and Emily Dickinson.

Although twentieth-century poetry is predominantly free verse, some poets are more comfortable working with traditional rhyme and meter. For them, writing free verse seems, as Robert Frost put it, “like playing tennis with the net down." For other poets, writing free verse is an opportunity to create their own rhythmic and visual form. Some free-verse poets invent a new form for each poem. Others establish a pattern that they use from poem to poem, such as William Carlos Williams' variable FOOT or Whitman's pause for breath at the end of each line:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,

In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

See also:

BLANK VERSE, METER, RHYTHM, SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT.

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