Notes about "Free Verse" ("vers libre")

Ezra Pound once quoted T. S. Eliot as saying, "No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job." Because vers libre equals "free verse," the same maxim applies. It certainly may be the case that no verse is free if it uses a common language, because every human language is an overweening system of regulation and bondage that no speaker can escape without landing in unintelligibility.

But we must ask, "what is it free of?"

• No rhyme?
• No regular rhythm?
• No meter?
• No clear structure?

Whitman is an early example of “Free Verse.” (But even Whitman's techniques still help to impose structure and form. For example, "parallelism" and "anaphora.")

"Free verse" is used to recreate more nearly the sounds and cadences of spoken English.

William Carlos Williams felt that American speech requires a more flexible -- "variable" -- foot than the iambic foot of English poetry.

In "free verse," poets avoid close adherence to rigid rules of prosody (writing poetry) and use variable and irregular rhythms and meters that are based on loosely recurring patterns of words, phrases, and images.

Elements of “Free Verse”:

• Lack of metrical regularity and lack of conventional rhyme
• Use of repeated images, symbols, phrases, and grammatical units (words, phrases) as substitutes for regular rhyme and rhythm (e.g. phrases instead of feet)
• Use of enumerations and catalogs
• Use of initial rhyme (anaphora)
• Use of varying line lengths with varying numbers of syllables per line (e.g. cadences instead of meter)
• Idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation