Free Verse

Poetry without fixed meter or rhyme, organized by image, breath, and line instead of inherited pattern.

Specifications & Metrics

type

Poetic mode

origin

19th-century France and America

originator

Vers libristes (Gustave Kahn) and Walt Whitman

meter

Cadenced, unmetered lines

Core Principles & Analysis

• Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass opened the English free-verse tradition.
• French vers libre poets of the 1880s named the break with meter.
• Modernism made it the default mode of English-language poetry.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Free verse