Free Verse: Its Operating Principles & History

Free verse or vers libre is a concept that is hard to pin down. It is described as poetry that is typically non-metrical or non-rhyming and tends to closely follow the rhythms of natural speech. 

However, we should not be misled by the word “free” in free verse. Free verse instead of relying on the rigor of traditional meter and rhyme depends on its ability to recreate everyday speech patterns while discussing topics that are subtle, complicated, and filled with imagery.

Such qualities are missing in everyday speech. Therefore, this genre of poetry has to strike a balance between the judicious use of traditional poetic diction while coming across as natural and conversational. Free verse can be formally defined as poetry that is characterized by a lack of regular meter, rhyme, and fixed line length, instead relying on the cadences of modern conversational speech.

In this article, we talk about the definition and history of free verse and provide examples, including from one of the pioneers of the form — Ezra Pound. 

Portrait of Ezra Pound from 1963.

The operating principles of free verse

To understand how free verse operates, let’s look at an example from one of the giants of the genre, namely, Ezra Pound. The poem in question is “In a Station of the Metro” (published in 1913): 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The poem is brief. In fact, the title alone is close to one-third of the two lines that make up the poem. What else can we notice about the features of the poem?  The poem’s two lines don’t rhyme completely (although there is a quasi-rhyme) and have no regular meter. The rhythms of the poem are also non-traditional. The pauses and inflections are all conversational. The poem is not even a complete sentence.

Instead, it is two sentence fragments separated by a colon. This is because in actual speech in real life, we often don’t talk in complete sentences. Pound is simply trying to recreate this effect by relying on sentence fragments.

However, despite the sentence fragments and the lack of traditional rhyme and meter in the poem, it cannot be described as abandoning all the concepts of traditional poetry. There is an emphasis on a picturesque and concrete image. We also have a number of sound-based literary devices. For example, there is consonance in the repetition of “p” sounds in “apparition” and “petals.” One can also notice semi-rhyme and assonance in “crowd” and “bough.” 

Something can also be said about the arrangement of the line. There is no rhyme, but the line has its own logical arrangement. The first line ends with a colon and the second line is the material contained as what is introduced or presented by the colon.

What does the poem even mean?

The poem is easy enough to read. However, what exactly does it mean or what is it about? The poet presents with a specific image and leaves no explicit comment except a comparison. Such an image can even be described as a kind of fragmentary vision. The setting of the poem is only betrayed by its title. The poet is at a station in the metro. Pound is describing the faces of the people he sees as “Petals on a wet, black bough.” 

Such a description is simultaneously romantic and depressing. Flowers on a bough is exactly the type of beautiful or picturesque image we expect from traditional romantic poetry. However, the setting here is decidedly urban — a metro station in a major European city. And not many Romantic poems have left us with such a brief and fragmentary image. We can interpret the poem in two ways. 

The first is that the poet is making a statement on his philosophy of modern poetry. Modern poetry no longer has to be restricted by traditional ideas such as conventional settings in nature. A metro station is as good a setting as the fields and meadows to inspire poetry. 

In that regard, comparing human faces to flowers and condensing the environment of the metro station to a wet black bough proves the point by showing the ordinary city dweller as interesting a subject for study as say the natural landscape associated with “Mont Blanc” in Percy Shelley’s poem of the same name. The condensed nature of the poem also suggests that the image presented is allowed to speak for itself.

The second interpretation relates to the poet’s statement on the nature of modern industrial civilization. The metro station is described as black and wet, suggesting an unhealthy and sickly environment. Human faces being compared to flowers on a bough, in turn, suggest a precarious and unrooted existence. 

Flowers don’t typically grow on branches. They are best suited for soil. In the view of Ezra Pound, modern industrialization inspires a life lived in impersonal ugliness, with human beauty and existence being random, uncertain, precarious, and even meaningless. 

This precarity is further emphasized by using the word “apparition” to describe the human faces, making us doubt whether the masses of people seen bustling through a metro station daily live lives with any meaning beyond the routine of waking up, going to work, and going back home to sleep and repeating it all over again. 

What can we draw from this analysis about the operating principles of free verse? We can say the following of free verse: 

• It relies heavily on following conversational speech patterns

• It uses efficient language and imagery to make a point

• Concrete images are often left by themselves to suggest specific associations and meanings

• It doesn’t rely on regular rhyme or meter

• The poetic line (as opposed to meter) is treated as an important organizing unit

Now, not all free verse follows all these principles all the time. For example, there are several free verse poems that employ rhyme and classical or traditional metrical forms in novel ways. However, the insistence on properly recreating modern conversational speech patterns and cadences is the primary requisite for free verse. 

A brief history of free verse

Free verse has a complicated history, which is not going to be given full treatment in this article. One of the more important and earliest free verse poets was Walt Whitman. He published his first and most important work — Leaves of Grass — in 1855. It was a lifelong project that he kept working for his whole life.

In 1855, when the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published, the collection contained twelve poems. However, the final 1892 edition has over 400 poems. In it, Whitman introduced a radical new form of poetry, which abandoned traditional verse forms and structure. 

In his attempt to create a new form of American poetry, he relied on a strange mixture of influences, ranging from Indian mysticism to the prose of the Old Testament Bible. In fact, one of his more famous poems, “Song of Myself” appears to be partly inspired by the “Song of Solomon” in the Old Testament. 

Vers libre, a French invention

However, despite the importance of Whitman’s contribution to modern poetics, free verse as understood in terms of its place in modern poetry is the result of French influence on English poetry. English-speaking writers such as Ezra Pound were responsible for taking aspects of vers libre as established by famous late nineteenth-century French symbolist poets such as by Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Laforgue, and Corbière. 

Free verse is a translation of the French term “vers libre.” It became current in English poetry based on the work and advocacy of writers such as T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. It also became a central element in the Imagist movement, which was started in England in 1912 by the following writers — Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, F.S. Flint, and Hilda Doolittle.

Important early free verse poets include Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens. In the following section, we look at different examples of free verse.

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A few examples of free verse

Free verse can be as varied and as unique as the different authors who experiment with it. It is the de facto style of poetry practiced by modern poets. In this section, we examine a few free verse poems from the “greats” to get an idea behind the operating principles of free verse. 

The first poet we will look at is Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (1865): 

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

The poem ignores traditional rhyme and meter. However, it relies heavily on repetitive rhetorical devices, namely anaphora. Anaphora means repetition at the beginning. This repetition takes the form of “when” and “when I” and occurs consecutively for the first four lines.

This can be described as the first movement of the poem, where the poet describes the stuffy lecture room and his negative reaction to what we assume is a long and boring lecture. The second movement of the poem describes the poet leaving the room and going out into the “moist night air.” 

So instead of relying on traditional stanza divisions, the poet counts on the contour of his ideas separating the two movements featured in the poem, which is in line with one of the central tenets of free verse. 

The second poet is E. E. Cummings’ poem [Buffalo Bill’s] (published in 1920):

Buffalo Bill ’s

defunct

               who used to

               ride a watersmooth-silver

                                                                  stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

                                                                                                     Jesus

he was a handsome man 

                                                  and what i want to know is

how do you like your blue-eyed boy

Mister Death

The poem is about the death of Buffalo Bill, a legendary showman and cowboy, who has died. Cummings uses a number of experimental elements in terms of spelling, punctuation, and line arrangements. 

For example, Buffalo Bill is described not as dead, but “defunct.” It’s hard to know what we should make of the poem’s tone. Is he paying true homage  to Buffalo Bill or is Buffalo Bill being mocked here using irony or sarcasm as a literary device? We can never know for sure. 

However, what is noticeable is the conversational speech patterns that exist in the poem, which is one of the hallmarks of free verse. For example, Jesus, he was a handsome man.” This conversational or even colloquial cadence is further emphasized with the last two lines addressing death “how do you like your blue-eyed boy / Mister Death.” 

The poem may well be sincere when we consider the reference to Buffalo Bill’s beauty. The poet may be emphasizing the random and unforgiving nature of death in terms of who succumbs to it. Therefore, despite the experimental nature of the poem, the theme remains classic. 

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Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2025, June 09). Free Verse: Its Operating Principles & History. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/free-verse