by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: October 27, 2008   Last Updated: June 20, 2011

To say that free verse is not poetry is to say that Walt Whitman, the father of American free verse, was not a poet but merely wrote prose with odd line breaks and lots of repetition.  The terms verse and poetry are synonymous, Verse is defined as "Metrical composition, form, or structure; metrical language or speech, poetry." The term verse has wider application than does poetry. It may refer to a single line of a longer poem, a number of lines or a stanza of a poem or song. or a sequence of lines in music leading to a chorus or separating one chorus from another.

Mistaken notions about free verse and blank verse are commonplace. Blank verse is distinct from free verse.  English blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. In French poetry, it also includes unrhymed six-accent verse; however, such twelve-syllable lines - known as Alexandrines - are rarely found in English poetry. Alexander Pope spoofed the 12-syllable line thus in An Essay on Criticism:

A needless Alexandrine ends the song
That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

Pope's first line has five accents making it iambic pentameter: da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM. The second line has six accented syllables with a central pause or caesura. It can be scanned variously, but most of us hear da DUM da DUM da DUM, DUM da da DUM da DUM. The image of the wounded snake and the words "slow length" reinforce the extra long line visually and aurally.

Free verse has irregular cadence and lacks traditional stanza form. Just as blank verse has variations and substitutions of non-iambic feet to lend emphasis or prevent singsong regularity, free verse often has interior rhyme, fortuitous end-rhyme, alliteration, and all the other terms of figurative language.

Finally, the statement that all poetry must have meter excludes all concrete poetry and the innovations of literary figures like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D., all of whom found the formal verse of the Victorian period stilted and employed the tones and cadences of spoken language. All poetry - rhymed, metrical, and free - must have structure. Line breaks evoke voice and tone. Writers of free verse are conscious of the cadences and rhythms, and precise word selection

Observe the following examples to illustrate the distinctions made above. The preceding sentence, just like this one, is prose and makes no pretense of doing more than imparting information. I could have said: "I hope today

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