Free Verse — Definition, Form, and Examples
What is free verse poetry?
Free verse is a poetic form that does not contain a rhyme scheme or specific rhythm. Instead, it mimics the pace and rhythm of natural speech. The name derives from the form’s freedom in not being limited by rhyme or meter.
With no set rhyme scheme or meter, poets may use literary devices like alliteration, onomatopoeia, and simile. Examples of free verse poems exploded after Walt Whitman, sometimes called the father of free verse, experimented with the form of poetry in the 19th century.
Many early 20th century American poets like e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Carl Sandburg wrote extensively in free verse.
Free verse poetry form
The following characteristics detail the form of free verse:
Rhyme: There is no set rhyme scheme; however, free verse does provide poets with the creative license to incorporate rhyming. Poets who choose to use rhymes do not often create a set pattern.
Rhythm: Lines do not require a set number of stressed and unstressed syllables; there is no steady beat. Instead, free verse poems imitate the natural flow of speech.
Line Breaks: Poets focus on using line breaks to create a specific effect rather than rhyme and rhythm. Incorporating short, simple lines or elaborate elongated ones grab the reader’s attention, thus suggesting the importance of those aspects of the poem.
Blank verse vs. free verse
Blank verse and free verse differ in the following ways:
| Characteristic | Free Verse | Blank Verse |
|---|---|---|
| Rhyme Scheme | unrhymed lines | unrhymed lines |
| Metrical Pattern | no metrical pattern | iambic pentameter |
| Usage | contemporary poets | 16th – 17th-century poets |
| Examples Lines | Well, son, I’ll tell you: / Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. / It’s had tacks in it, / And splinters, / And boards torn up…
-- “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes |
The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry/ Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
-- “Frost at Midnight” by Robert Frost |
Poets such as William Shakespeare and John Milton wrote in blank verse; more modern poets like Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath wrote in free verse.
Free verse examples
The following examples contain excerpts from poems written in free verse:
“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
“The Garden” by Ezra Pound
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.