Free verse is a style of poetry that does not follow traditional rules of poetry composition. In writing free verse, poets avoid such usual elements as regular meter or rhyme. Instead, they vary the lengths of lines, use irregular numbers of syllables in lines, and employ odd breaks at the end of each line. They also use irregular accents and rhythms and uneven rhyme schemes. But free verse is not free from all form. It does use such basic poetic techniques as alliteration and repetition.
Free verse first flourished during the 1800’s when the romantic poets adopted the style. The American poet Walt Whitman is often considered the father of free verse, using the style effectively in his “Song of Myself” (1855). In the early 1900’s, a movement in poetry called imagism began using free verse. Such imagist poets as the American-born T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound used free verse to create poetry based on the placement of precise images next to personal commentary. E. E. Cummings, a highly unorthodox American poet, experimented with unusual punctuation and typography. By the mid-1900’s, free verse had become the standard verse form in poetry, especially in the works of such American poets as Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and William Carlos Williams.
