by Joshua Jones

Created on: October 11, 2008   Last Updated: February 08, 2009

One of our world's most stunning contradictions is free verse "poetry". By nature free verse is considered a poem without structure or form. It strives to break free of the "old chains of meter and rhyme", professing that form stifles the "intellectual creativity" of an artist. But along with these unsubstantiated claims about metrical verse, free verse is in and of itself an oxymoron; the verse is the slave of the poet- to be stretched and worked until the emotional and intellectual whims of the poet are satisfied.

But in regard to why poets of today gravitate towards free verse, it is a much simpler form (and, yes, ironically I consider it a form). When meter and rhyme are removed form the poem all you are left with is existential drivel hacked into uneven lines with the occasional alliterative device. The technical skill is lost for the semantic skill so many poets are proud of in modern literature. Why forsake form? It has rules and guidelines, which modern culture shuns as unnecessary. They call their form free but are chained to transience and incomprehensibility. Many people now have no capacity for understanding poetry at all because every time anyone asks what poetry is, the poet will give them some indecipherable answer that belongs on a greeting card. The once great art form has become a cess pool of instability and triteness.

Another draw of free verse is its mystique. Since free verse became popular, its main themes and driving philosophical forces were those of existentialism and moral relativism. These two philosophies have induced a poetry based upon fleeting images, with similarities to the "high" one feels on drugs (the sixties here had the major effect). Many now find the interpretation of free verse akin to that of modern day mystics crying not through a bowl of water, but a page.

Another commonly cited reason for writing free verse was actually suggested by one of the worlds best metrical poets, John Milton, several hundred years ago. In his preface to "Paradise Lost" he argues that his poem is better for not having rhyme. He references the lack of end rhyme in the ancient works of the Greek poets. Many poets of today take this vein of argument, arguing that they adhere to the classical forms, simply reworked for the modern world.

The final reason is ignorance. In general the majority of people for all intents and purposes, do not know the difference between metrical and free verse. This is not their fault, but in general the structure and for are not stressed in school, and the teachers who would teach it prefer free verse themselves to the traditional forms. Partially this is due to the nature of much of the old metrical poetry produced during its zenith during the Elizabethan Age. Much of this verse and the verse of the following Puritan era were of a devotional nature.

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