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Of course, free verse is poetry. As a debate topic, this rates right up there with Does Macy's Sell Pantyhose. To say that free verse is not poetry is to say that Walt Whitman, the father of American free verse, was not a poet at all but just wrote prose with odd line breaks and lots of repetition.

As a retired English teacher, I feel compelled to argue against mistaken notions about free verse and blank verse by writers on the affirmative side of the Is free verse poetry question. First of all, the terms verse and poetry are synonymous, as seen in definition 3 of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (OED). "Metrical composition, form, or structure; metrical language or speech, poetry." The term verse 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. Therefore, to say "no verse, no poetry" is equivalent to saying "no wiener, no hotdog."

Blank verse is distinct from free verse. The two terms are not interchangeable. In modern usage, blank verse is defined as unrhymed iambic pentameter or the unrhymed heroic or alexandrine. An alexandine line differs from pentameter by having 6 rather than five feet or accented syllables.

Free verse has irregular cadence and lacks traditional stanzaic form or tradition. The French term vers libre is defined in OED as "Unrhymed verse which disregards the traditional rules of prosody." The French did not use the term (again, according to OED) until 1900. Just as blank verse has variations and substitution of non iambic feet to lend emphasis or prevent singsong regularity, free verse often has interior rime, fortuitous end-rhyme, alliteration, and all the other terms of figurative language. Perhaps the earliest free verse, appearing before the term was invented, was the earliest English translation of the Bible.

It has also been written that vers libre was invented as a replacement of or substitution for alexandrine verse, so called because it was employed in an Old French romance about Alexander the Great. at the end of the 16th century. This is, I feel, too strict a definition of free verse, whether the term is written in English or French. Walt Whitman was not consciously rebelling against a French tradition he had never heard about. Neoclassicist Englishman Alexander Pope spoofed the 12-syllable line thus in An Essay on /Criticism in 1711:

A needless Alexandrine ends the song
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