Free verse

Free verse is poetry which does not have either metre or rhyme, i.e., it does not conform to a specific metrical scheme and does not make use of rhyme. Sometimes the French expression vers libre (pronounced vair LEEBrer, IPA: /vɛr ˈlibrə/) - it means: free verse - is used instead of free verse to characterise this type of poetry. Be careful to distinguish free verse (or vers libre) from blank verse: blank verse lacks rhyme but has metre.

Although lacking the regular rhythms characteristic of metre, free verse does not lack rhythm - it is only that these rhythms do not have the regularity characteristic of a metrical pattern. Rhythm is integral to free verse in the way that metre] and rhyme are integral to most traditional poetry; and the distinctive rhythms of a poem written in free verse will contribute to its poetic quality.

Here, as an example of free verse, are the opening lines of The Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965):

'A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.'

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melted snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

The expression free verse' is used particularly to characterise some of the poetry of certain twentieth-century poets - for example T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Ezra Pound (1885-1972), and W.H. Auden (1907-1973). Eliot himself, however, in an essay entitled 'Reflections on Vers Libre (1917), complained about the use of the expression on the grounds that good free verse is not free but involves what he called 'a contrast between fixity and flux', i.e., an alternation between conformity to some traditional poetic form and movement away from it. Whether this claim is true of all Eliot's free verse, let alone of all 'good' free verse, is open to question, but what is unquestionably true is that poems written in free verse may contain, as well as the occasional rhyme, lines which exemplify one or other of the traditional metres. What there will not be is the consistent adherence to a specific metre and rhyme scheme characteristic of traditional poetry.

Of course adherence to a particular metre is a matter of degree: it can range form very strict to very loose. And so there will be borderline cases, in which it will be a matter of judgment whether a particular poem is better described as written in free verse or as written loosely in a specific metre, e.g., iambic pentameters.

See further blank verse and sprung rhythm.