by Effie Moore Salem

Created on: September 14, 2008   Last Updated: January 05, 2009

It is only natural that poets prefer free verse poetry over measured verse and preset conditions. This allows for innovation in poetry and aligns it closer to the art that it was meant to be. Poetry, essentially, is making art with words. Although poetic conventions have created many different styles of poetry one must never forget that these began with a lone individual playing with words. Why then should not each poet who considers his art worthy, have the same privilege?

Free verse - in French, vers libre - has no meter or no rhyme length but it does depend on natural speech with its unstressed, stressed, syllables. The poets who use it to its best advantage create melodious sentences. Where can we find samples of it where it is used to its best advantage? In the biblical Psalms, The Song of Songs and throughout the bible. These were the first sightings of free verse. The style and method were later copied by John Milton in some of his poetry, especially when his poems had biblical topics.

After the neoclassic age, it was again adopted in Europe by such writers as John Milton, Blake, and others in England, Goethe in Germany, Baudelaire, Hugo, Bertrand in France. The neoclassic period preceding it was about man and his earth and less about God. Alexander Pope sums up the attitude in his Essay on Man: "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, / The best study of mankind is man." This is not what free verse is all about. Free verse makes room for Him.

Walt Whitman used it and populated it and gave it stature and purpose. Likewise John Manley Hopkins was quite fond of this poetic style. Free verse is not the same as blank verse. Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter and may have had its beginnings when some poet decided on a modified free verse style. In other words, to forego rhyming but to retain the measured line is blank verse. It closely resembles the English speech patterns and is very popular in poetic circles.

Most of us now and then poets intertwine these two poetic methods and hardly know one from the other. Sometimes we rely more on the sound of the words as we read them aloud and do not tax ourselves, or the words, with stress they don't need. Blank verse works well in drama. The only thing missing in blank verse is the rhyme. In Free verse there is no measured lines, no rhymes but there are lines. We can stop a line and start another wherever we think one is needed.

Free verse is free. We are unhampered in our ways of turning our words into art. Its biggest problem - and if there were no problems it wouldn't be a poem - right - is where to stop one line and to start another. This is important and is its only identification separating this from prose. There are prose poems of course but they belong there not here. How would I divide that sentence were I to make it into free verse? Poems of prose finish the race; / free verse quits / when and where and if. / Blank verse follows the dots and dashes.

Source: Drury, John, Creating Poetry, Pp 66, 1991, Cincinnatti, Ohio, Writer Digest Books

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